All the productions of Art, from the time it has been directed and developed by Christian influences, may be regarded under three different aspects. 1. The purely religious aspect, which belongs to one mode of faith; 2. The poetical aspect, which belongs to all; 3. The artistic, which is the individual point of view, and has reference only to the action of the intellect on the means and material employed. There is pleasure, intense pleasure, merely in the consideration of Art as _Art_; in the faculties of comparison and nice discrimination, brought to bear on objects of beauty; in the exercise of a cultivated and refined taste on the productions of mind in any form whatever. But a three-fold, or rather a thousand-fold, pleasure is theirs who to a sense of the poetical unite a sympathy with the spiritual in Art, and who combine with delicacy of perception, and technical knowledge, more elevated sources of pleasure, more variety of association, habits of more excursive thought. Let none imagine, however, that, in placing before the uninitiated these unpretending volumes, I assume any such superiority as is here implied. Like a child that has sprung on a little way before its playmates, and caught a glimpse through an opening portal of some varied Eden within, all gay with flowers, and musical with birds, and haunted by divine shapes which beckon onward; and, after one rapturous survey, runs back and catches its companions by the hand and hurries them forwards to share the new-found pleasure, the yet unexplored region of delight; even so it is with me:—I am on the outside, not the inside, of the door I open. [Illustration: 2 After Gaudenzio Ferrari, at Saronno] PART I. Ye too must fly before a chasing hand, Angels and saints in every hamlet mourned! Ah! if the old idolatry be spurn’d, Let not your radiant shapes desert the land! Her adoration was not your demand,— The fond heart proffer’d it,—the servile heart, And therefore are ye summon’d to depart; Michael, and thou St. George, whose flaming brand The Dragon quell’d; and valiant Margaret, Whose rival sword a like opponent slew; And rapt Cecilia, seraph-haunted queen Of harmony; and weeping Magdalene, Who in the penitential desert met Gales sweet as those that over Eden blew! WORDSWORTH.