Though Heaven and Earth,
indeed, might join to help her, we yet know that the soul of the maiden
will help itself,--that her hope clings fast, and her courage is
undaunted, and her faith complete.
Among her thronged emotions we look in vain for shame. Her nakedness is
a coarse chance of her overwhelming situation, for which she is no more
concerned than for her galled wrists or her dishevelled hair. What is it
to such a queen as she, that the eyes of grinning brutes are blessed by
her perfect beauties?
The qualities which constitute true greatness in a statue such as this
are, if we apprehend them aright,--first, that sublime simplicity of
Idea which omnipotently sways the beholder, and alike inspires his
coarseness or his culture; next, that personality, that moving humanness
of feeling, which holds him by his very heart-strings, and makes him
forget its marble, to accept its flesh and blood; and, finally, that
wondrous skill of nice manipulation, which, neglecting nothing in the
myriad of anatomical and physiological details,--not even the faintest
sigh or the dimmest tremor,--tells, fibre by fibre, a tale that all may
read, and comes to us with a story "to hold children from play and old
men from the chimney-corner.
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