In the last of these departments it found the noblest scope for its activity; for beyond the grave, according to Christian belief, the account of the striving, hoping, and resisting soul is settled.

The corpse upon the bier may bear the stamp of spiritual character impressed on it in life; but the spirit, with its struggle and its passion, has escaped as from a prison-house, and flown else-whither.
The body of the dead man, for whom this world is over, and who sleeps in peace, awaiting resurrection, and thereby not wholly dead, around whose tomb watch sympathising angels or contemplative genii, was, therefore, the proper subject for the highest Christian sculpture.

Here, if anywhere, the right emotion could be adequately expressed in stone, and the moulded form be made the symbol of repose, expectant of restored activity.

The greatest sculptor of the modern age was essentially a poet of Death.
Painting, then, for the reasons already assigned and insisted on, was the art demanded by the modern intellect upon its emergence from the stillness of the Middle Ages.

The problem, however, even for the art of painting was not simple.