There was, on a small pannel, the head of an angel smiling. He said he was often pursued by dark fancies, haunted by melancholy forebodings, desponding over himself and his art, "and he resolved to create an angel for himself, which should smile upon him out of heaven." So he painted his most lovely head, in which the radiant spirit of joy seems to beam from every feature at once; and I thought while I looked upon it, that it were enough to exorcise a whole legion of blue devils. It is rarely that we can associate the mirthful with the beautiful and the sublime--even I could have deemed it next to impossible; but the effulgent cheerfulness of this divine face corrected that idea, which, after all, is not in bright lovely Nature, but in the shadow which the mighty spirit of Humanity casts from his wings, as he hangs brooding over her between heaven and earth. Afterwards he placed upon his easel a wondrous face, which made me shrink back--not with terror, for it was perfectly beautiful--but with awe, for it was unspeakably fearful: the hair streamed back from the pale brow--the orbs of sight appeared at first two dark, hollow, unfathomable spaces, like those in a skull; but when I drew nearer, and looked attentively, two lovely living eyes looked at me again out of the depth of shadow, as of from the bottom of an abyss. The mouth was divinely sweet, but sad, and the softest repose rested on every feature. This, he told me, was the ANGEL OF DEATH: it was the original conception of a head for the large picture now at Vienna, representing the Angel of Death bearing aloft two children into the regions of the blessed: the heavens opening above, and the earth and stars sinking beneath his feet. The next thing which struck me was a small picture--two satyrs butting at each other, while a shepherd carries off the nymph for whom they are contending. This was most admirable for its grotesque power and spirit, and, moreover, extremely well coloured. Another in the same style represented a satyr sitting on a wine-skin, out of which he drinks; two arch-looking nymphs are stealing on him from behind, and one of them pierces the wine-skin with her hunting-spear. There was a portrait of himself, but I would not laud it--in fact, he has not done himself justice. Only a colossal bust, in the same style, and wrought with the same feeling as Dannecker's bust of Schiller, could convey to posterity an adequate idea of the head and countenance of Retzsch. I complimented him on the effect which his Hamlet had produced in England; he told me, that it had been his wish to illustrate the Midsummer Night's Dream, or the Tempest, rather than Macbeth: the former he will still undertake, and, in truth, if any one succeeds in embodying a just idea of a Miranda, a Caliban, a Titania, and the poetical burlesque of the Athenian clowns, it will be Retzsch, whose genius embraces at once the grotesque, the comic, the wild, the wonderful, the fanciful, the elegant!