The more we scrutinize the middle age, the closer we discern the changes constantly appearing in a strange confusion, we find this element rising to the surface. The effects of the Renaissance, the inspiration, as we have ourselves termed it, are becoming more widely and deeply felt. As water falling into a glass jar displaces the air therein accumulated, so the potent, heavy, subduing forces of the Renaissance, sinking gradually to the bottom of, and filling, men's minds, caused the elements of confusion, discord, and of this same antinomianism. to give way, to rise to the surface and to depart forever. The story of Aucassin and Nicolette is filled with this spirit of love-worship-sufficient evidence, we imagine, to certify the age to which it belongs. We are inclined to side with Mr. Pater in his assertion that the Renaissance began in France, that is, that Renaissance in progress within the limits of the middle age. In his chapter entitled " Pico della Mirandula," Mr. Pater cleverly discourses of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece. Pico della Mirandula, who was one of these scholars, came to Florence, after many wanderings, in 1482. Florence had always had an "affinity for the mystic and dreamy philosophy of Plato, while the colder and more practical philosophy of Aristotle had flourished in Padua and other cities of the north." M. Renan has clearly pointed this out. Now Pico was a man of erudition, and was possessed of an unrivalled thirst for knowledge. From Florence he went to Rome, where he offered to defend nine hundred bold paradoxes, drawn from the most opposite sources, against all comers. It were pleasure to give prominence to some of the remarks made by our author when speaking of Aandro Botticelli, who possessed "the freshness, the uncertain, and diffident promise which belongs to the earlier Renaissance itself, and makes it, perhaps, the most interesting period in the history of the mind;" and the study of whose work causes one to begin to understand to how great a place in human culture the art of Italy had been called. Also, to give more than a passing notice to Lucca della Robbia, whose system of art came midway between the system of the Greek sculptors and the system of Michael Angelo, and partook of what Winckelmann terms the Allgemeinheit of the Greeks-that is, their breadth, generality, universality, and of the studied incompleteness of the great Tuscan artist. When will the world in general begin to understand that sweetness was one of the great qualities of the disposition and style of Michael Angelo? And, apropos, when will it also discern this same genial quality in the writings of Victor Hugo, since it does exist therein as truly as light itself. "When one speaks of Michael Angelo," says Grimm, "woods, clouds, seas, and mountains disappear, and only what is formed by the spirit of man remains behind." The natural world seems hardly to have an existence for him. In the words of our author, "he has traced no flowers like those with which Leonardo stars over his gloomiest rocks; nothing like the fretwork of wings and flames in which Blake frames his most startling conceptions; no forest scenery like Titian's fills his backgrounds-but only blank ranges of rock and dim vegetable forms as blank as they, as in a world before the creation of the first five days." It is unnecessary to trace the career of this great man from the beginning onward through its varying stages of luck, or misfortune. Almost every one is familiar with the history of the man; but the man himself—how vague, how mysterious, how unapproachable he seems to us! There is a great deal of sunshine, but still more of shade. We discover his strength with readiness, but the bitterness of it is apparent only after deeper searching. The best characterization of the man is in the words of Raphael : "He treats the pope as the king of France himself would not dare to treat him; he goes along the streets of Rome like an executioner." The more we read of him he seems the more to have belonged to that number who incur the judgment of Dante, as having wilfully lived in sadness. "But his genius is in harmony with itself, and just as in the products of his art we find resources of sweetness within their exceeding strength, so in his own story, also, bitter as the ordinary sense of it may be, there are select pages shut in among the rest-pages one might easily turn over too lightly, but which yet sweeten the whole volume. The interest of Michael Angelo's poems is that they make us spectators of this struggle; the struggle of a strong nature to adorn and attune itself; the struggle of a desolating passion, which yearns to be resigned, and sweet and pensive as Dante's was. It is a consequence of the occasional and informal character of his poetry that it brings us nearer to himself—his own mind and temper—than any work done merely to support a literary reputation could possibly do." There is one epoch in the artist's life which blooms like a rose in the desert, which shoots forth a radiance—like that of a meteor falling in a dark, starless night. It is the epoch of his acquaintance and half-distant intimacy with Vittoria Colonna. In this brief space— from 1542 to 1547-the life-long effort to tranquilize his vehement emotions by withdrawing them into the region of ideal sentiment, becomes successful, and the significance of Vittoria in it is, that she realizes for him a type of affection which even in disappointment may charm and sweeten his spirit. Wherein is the artist inferior to the poet of the "Divina Commedia," in the following sonnet addressed to Vittoria ? "Bring back the time, when blind desire ran free, ness. Bring back those journeys ta'en so toilsomely, Small profit hast thou of a weak old man. My soul, that toward the other shore doth strive, Michael Angelo has not unfrequently, been termed a disciple of Dante. More properly may we call him a disciple of Plato. It was the Platonic tradition of the passage of the soul through one form of life after another which moulded Michael Angelo's verse. The artist is always pressing forward from the outward beauty-il bel del fuor che agli occhi piace to apprehend the unseen beauty; trascenda nella forma universale that abstract form of beauty about which the Platonists reason. Michael Angelo is Platonic, also, in his views of death, and he regards it with a maturity of mind, with caution and with dispassioned serious"Michael Angelo is so ignorant of the spiritual world, of the new body and its laws, that he does not surely know whether the consecrated host may not be the body of Christ. And of all that range of sentiment he is the poet, a poet still alive and in possession of our inmost thoughts,—dumb inquiry, the relapse, after death, into the formlessness which preceded life, change, revolt from that change, then the correcting, hallowing, consoling rush of pity; at last, far off, thin and vague, yet not more vague than the most definite thoughts men have had through three centuries on a matter that has been so near their hearts-the new body; a passing light, a mere intangible, external effect over those too rigid or too formless faces; a dream that lingers a moment, retreating in the dawn, incomplete, aimless, helpless; a thing with faint hearing, faint memory, faint power of touch; a breath, a flame in the doorway, a feather in the wind." The strange interfusion of sweetness and strength is not to be found in those who claimed to be his followers, but it may be discerned in many who preceded him; it may, unaware, be found in William Blake and in Victor Hugo. By these we are assisted in understanding him, while he, in turn, justifies and interprets them. Who will say that this is not the chief use in studying the old masters? The remaining pages of Mr. Pater's volume are devoted to a careful consideration of Leonardo da Vinci, the painter, who, for all succeeding ages, fixed the outward type of Christ. Our author reviews the life of his subject with a peculiar degree of admiration and respect. His legend, as the French say, seems to stand out in bold relief. The story is old, oft repeated, and familiar. But never before do we remember to have read a characterization so full of truth, so cordial of sympathy, so dispassionate, so overflowing with tenderness and with a friendly love for the man. Leonardo has been too often abused. The faults of the age were his faults, he partook of a share only ; but, notwithstanding all that, he was one eminently fitted for his calling, a true artist, who labored in sincerity and truth. We regret that we must close our remarks here. Our limited space will not permit of even a brief consideration of the merits of Joachim du Bellay, who struck the first note of the literary revolution in France, and should be remembered as having belonged to the famous Pleiad of French poetry. The last chapter in the volume before us is devoted to Winckelmann. In his preface, Mr. Pater remarks that "Winckelmann, coming in the eighteenth century, really belongs in spirit to an earlier age. By his enthusiasm for the things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake, by his Hellenism, his life-long struggle to attain to the Greek spirit, he is in sympathy with the humanists of an earlier century. He is the last fruit of the Renaissance, and explains in a striking way its motive and tendencies." We have attempted to present a faint idea of Mr. Pater's work. Within the limits of about two hundred printed pages, he has presented to his readers a most delicious feast. He has furnished food for digestion, food such as is always acceptable to him who is in love with the subject. However we may choose to differ from him on certain points, we must acknowledge him as a careful thinker, a judicious critic, and a scholarly writer. SCIENCE. The Atmosphere. Translated from the French of Camille Flammarion. Edited by JAMES GLAISHER, F. R. S., Superintendent of the Magnetical and Meteorological Department of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. With ten cromo-lithographs and eighty-six wood cuts. 12mo, pp. 453. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1873. “In eâ vivimus, movemur et sumus," is the appropriate motto of the author at the head of his preface. We live and move and have our being at the bottom of an etherial sea, reaching over the whole world. The atmosphere is the most common and at the same time the most inestimable of nature's gifts to man, and yet, not until compara tively recent times has it received the degree of attention and investigation which its universality and importance demand. From the time of the Chaldean shepherds, men have eagerly watched the distant stars and endeavored to trace in their mysterious movements good or ill to humankind; but the air which they were unconsciously breathing, fraught with unnumbered influences upon man and all that relates to him, was comparatively unobserved and unknown. The winds blew as they listed, but none knew whence they came or whither they went. Nor is this fact inexplicable. This subtile, invisible fluid escaped all known means of detection and analysis. Not until ages of chemical experiment had revealed the elements of matter, and the whole circle of physical sciences had advanced to a high degree, could this most common of substances be analyzed and its connection with animal and vegetable life be established. Even the most subtle of all fluids, electricity, had to be subdued and applied in the telegraph, before the modern science of meteorology could begin to tell the course of the winds. Indeed, we yet see the infancy of this science, but the results already obtained by our "weather department" promise that men may not only know whence the wind cometh, but predict whither it goeth, and its numerous effects. As M. Flammarion observes: "The science of the atmosphere is the question of the day. We are just now, in regard to this study, in an analogous situation to that of modern astronomy in the days of Kepler. Astronomy was founded in the seventeenth century. Meteorology will be the work of the nineteenth." (Preface, p. 6.) This work of M. Flammarion embodies not only all that is now known upon this interesting and important subject, but also a large amount of information in regard to the kindred subjects of light, heat, electricity, etc. The subjects treated of will be better understood by a note of the contents: Book first treats of our planet and its vital fluid, including the chemical components of the air, sound and the voice, and aeronautical ascents. Book second discusses light and the optical phenomena of the air, including the rainbow, spectershadows, the mirage, shooting stars, and the zodiacal light. In book third, we have much valuable information upon the temperature of the air, climate, distribution of temperature, etc. Book fourth explains the wind and its causes, touches upon sea currents, and includes a very interesting account of variable and special winds, the simoon, hurricane, waterspouts, etc. Book fifth treats of the water upon the surface of the earth and in the atmosphere, including the clouds, rain, hail and prodigies, such as showers of blood, frogs, fish, etc. Finally, in book sixth is discussed electricity, thunder storms, and lightning, the jack-o'-lanterns and aurora borealis. Thus it will be seen that the subject is remarkably fruitful, and that the learned author has not hesitated to introduce whatever was germain to the subject and might serve to illustrate it. Indeed, such |