182 THE STONES OF VENICE

of high authority. It was not revealed to Joseph that he should be lord over all Egypt; but the representation of his family by symbols of the most magnificent dominion, and yet as subject to him, must have been afterwards felt by him as a distinctly prophetic indication of his own supreme power. It was not revealed to him that the occasion of his brethren’s special humiliation before him should be their coming to buy corn; but when the event took place, must he not have felt that there was prophetic purpose in the form of the sheaves of wheat which first imaged forth their subjection to him?¹ And these two images of the sun doing obeisance, and the sheaves bowing down,-narrowed and imperfect intimations of great truth which yet could not be otherwise conveyed,-are both grotesques. The kine of Pharaoh eating each other, the gold and clay of Nebuchadnezzar’s image, the four beasts full of eyes, and other imagery of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse, are grotesques of the same kind, on which I need not farther insist.

§ 63. Such forms, however, ought perhaps to have been arranged under a separate head, as Symbolical Grotesque; but the element of awe enters into them so strongly, as to justify, for all our present purposes, their being classed with the other varieties of terrible grotesque. For even if the symbolic vision itself be not terrible, the scene of what may be veiled behind it becomes all the more awful in proportion to the insignificance or strangeness of the sign itself; and, I believe, this thrill of mingled doubt, fear, and curiosity lies at the very root of the delight which mankind take in symbolism. It was not an accidental necessity for the conveyance of truth by pictures instead of words, which led to its universal adoption wherever art was on the advance; but the Divine fear which necessarily follows on the understanding that a thing is other and greater than it seems; and which, it appears probable, has been

¹ [The Bible references to Joseph are Genesis xxxvii. 5,7,9; xli. 41; xlii. 5, 6; and the following references are Genesis xli. 4; Daniel ii. 32, 33; Ezekiel i. 18; Revelation iv. 6.]

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