Life is a dream between two slumbers; sleep is death's twin-brother; night is the shadow of death; death is the gate of life:--such is the mysterious mythology wrought by the sculptor of the modern world in marble.

All these figures, by the intensity of their expression, the vagueness of their symbolism, force us to think and question.

What, for example, occupies Lorenzo's brain?
Bending forward, leaning his chin upon his wrist, placing the other hand upon his knee, on what does he for ever ponder?
"The sight, as Rogers said well, 'fascinates and is intolerable.' Michelangelo has shot the beaver of the helmet forward on his forehead, and bowed his head, so as to clothe the face in darkness.
But behind the gloom there lurks no fleshless skull, as Rogers fancied.

The whole frame of the powerful man is instinct with some imperious thought.

Has he outlived his life and fallen upon everlasting contemplation?
Is he brooding, injured and indignant, over his own doom and the extinction of his race?
Is he condemned to witness in immortal immobility the woes of Italy he helped to cause?
Or has the sculptor symbolised in him the burden of that personality we carry with us in this life, and bear for ever when we wake into another world?
Beneath this incarnation of oppressive thought there lie, full length and naked, the figures of Dawn and Twilight, Morn and Evening.