“The Kiss before Going to Sleep.”—A painting of marvellous range of feeling. A mother with her daughters, from the grown-up one to the suckling infant at her breast. The big girl bends over her mother’s shoulder, as the latter is sitting, and takes her good-night kiss from the lips of the head turned to her. The baby has fallen asleep whilst feeding at the maternal bosom. The third, half-grown-up, has likewise been overcome by sleep, as she leans helplessly, with her whole weight, on her mother. The last twines her fondling fingers in her mother’s hand outstretched to her. The mother is the central point of the picture. From her gushes the force that penetrates, encompasses, attracts, and holds together the rest of the figures. Love it is which collects these beings and unites them in a marvellous circle. Thus they become a symbol of the force that has built up the universe itself, and keeps it in its eternal order. And this self-same love, which knits these hands in each other, bends these bodies to each other, brings these lips together, which is visibly the motive and attractive force, in all these simple but incomparably eloquent lines of movement, has also guided the magic brush capable of expressing so great a theme. He who at the sight of this lofty work does not feel all the hardness in him melting in joy stands outside humanity. Moreover, there is not a trace of declamation, or purpose, or _tremolo_ in its execution; no prettily pietistic rhetoric. Not a single adjective, but only neuter substantives, as in Roman inscriptions. That is precisely the receipt, which holds good in all times and in all places, for monumental works: eternal feelings expressed in eternal forms.