It is easy to see the spiritual beauty of Raffaelle's Madonnas, but it requires a deeper and more practised, all-embracing, loving, simple spirituality, to see the same beauty in the face of a worn-out, painful, peasant woman haggling about the price of cottons. Form and colour are but the vehicle for the spirit-meaning. In the "spiritual body" I fancy they will both be united with the meaning -- all and every part and property of man and woman instinct with spirit! MS. 1843. |