(_To her Sister._) _December_ 17 [1847]. Oh, my dearest, I have had such a day--my red Dominical, my Golden Letter, the 15th of December is its name, and of all my days in Rome this has been the most happy and glorious. Think of a day alone in the Sistine Chapel with [Greek: S] [Selina, Mrs. Bracebridge], quite alone, without custode, without visitors, looking up into that heaven of angels and prophets.... I did not think that I was looking at pictures, but straight into Heaven itself, and that the faults of the representation and the blackening of the colours were the dimness of my own earthly vision, which would only allow me to see obscurely, indistinctly, what was there in all its glory to be known even as I was known, if mortal eyes and understandings were cleared from the mists which we have wilfully thrown around them. There is Daniel, opening his windows and praying to the God of his Fathers three times a day in defiance of fear. You see that young and noble head like an eagle's, disdaining danger, those glorious eyes undazzled by all the honours of Babylon. Then comes Isaiah, but he is so divine that there is nothing but his own 53rd chapter will describe him. He is the Isaiah, the "_grosse Unbekannte_" of the Comfort ye, Comfort ye my people. I was rather startled at first by finding him so young, which was not my idea of him at all, while the others are old. But M. Angelo knew him better; it is the perpetual youth of inspiration, the vigour and freshness, ever new, ever living, of that eternal spring of thought which is typed under that youthful face. Genius has no age, while mind (Zechariah) has no youth. Next to Isaiah comes the Delphic Sibyl, the most beautiful, the most inspired of all the Sibyls here; but the distinction which M. Angelo has drawn even between _her_ and the _Prophets_ is so interesting. There is a security of inspiration about Isaiah; he is listening and he is speaking; "that which we _hear_ we declare unto you." There is an anxiety, an effort to hear even, about the Delphian; she is not quite sure; there is an uncertainty, a wistfulness in her eyes; she expects to be rewarded rather in another stage than this for her struggle to gain the prize of her high calling, to reach to the Unknown that Isaiah knows already. There is no uncertainty as to her feeling of being called to hear the voice, but she fears that her earthly ears are heavy and gross, and corrupt the meaning of the heavenly words. I cannot tell you how affecting this anxious look of her far-reaching eyes is to the poor mortals standing on the pavement below, while the Prophets ride secure on the storm of Inspiration.... I feel these things to be part of the word of God, of the ladder to Heaven. The word of God is all by which He reveals His thought, all by which He makes a manifestation of Himself to men. It is not to be narrowed and confined to one book, or one nation; and no one can have seen the Sistine without feeling that he has been very near to God, that he will understand some of His words better for ever after; and that Michael Angelo, one of the greatest of the sons of men, when one looks at the dome of St. Peter's on the one hand and the prophets and martyrs on the other, has received as much of the breath of God, and has done as much to communicate it to men, as any Seer of old. He has performed that wonderful miracle of giving form to the breath of God, wonderful whether it is done by words, colours, or hard stones....