Even in music (as the expression of the emotions of the soul in their flow and change, and in the struggle with inharmonious discords, till at last they finally dissolve in harmony) it is not so much the immediate feeling--for this would be no more artistic than the mere cry of passion--as rather the idea of it that the artist has in his mind, and that forms the subject of his representations. The musician strives to represent the whole idea--the beautiful and the marvelous in the whole progress of its development. Following the inmost life-pulse in its alternate rising and falling, he labors to give its unexpected transitions up to their sudden harmony or its repetitions of still increasing pitch up to a full and soothing close, or (if this is designedly to be left unattained) up to the abrupt and painful breaking off or gradual dying away and cessation of the plaintive note or the tone of ardent longing. And the same is the case with sculpture. But here we would premise the remark, that the principle with which we set out, of the triple nature and division of man’s being, is confirmed by the existence of a corresponding order and diversity in the fine arts. Among the arts, accordingly, whose object is the manifestation of the beautiful, music is pre-eminently the art for the soul, while sculpture is for the most part corporeal. Now, in sculpture it is not any actual figure or the body itself that the artist has in view. It is the general idea thereof that constitutes the subject-matter of his representations. He seeks to portray its most perfect structure, its full organic development, its exquisite correctness of symmetry and sublime beauty of form. And to all this even the expression of character and passion is in a certain degree subordinate. And exactly because the external medium which it employs, because the material mass on which its internal conceptions are to be stamped, or, rather, out of which they are to be worked, is the inanimate stone and cold marble, therefore does true sculpture aim at a higher excellence than the uniformity and death-like repose which characterize the Egyptian statues of the gods. It seeks rather to triumph by copying with the most marvelous truth and fidelity the living frame in its most rapid movements, and life in its most violent struggles, and by seizing its fleeting graces to fix them forever in its own imperishable creations.