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At last, after twenty years, he ca,

almost to the point where he had left off his Ada But now he had knowledge and skill

without vision He saw the puerility of his young conceptions,

he saw the unreal world in which they had been conceived He now

had a new strength in his sense of reality He felt as if he

were real, as if he handled real things He had worked for an for the church, restoring

the ork, gradually coe of beauty in the

plain labours Noanted again to carve things that were

utterances of himself

But he could not quite hitch on--always he was too busy,

too uncertain, confused Wavering, he began to study

To his surprise he found he could do it Modelling in clay, in

plaster, he produced beautiful reproductions, really beautiful

Then he set-to to h relief, in the

Donatello estion of his desire But the pitch of concentration would

not coave up He

continued to copy, or tomotives from

classic stuff He loved the Della Robbia and Donatello as he had

loved Fra Angelico when he was a young man His work had some of

the freshness, the naive alertness of the early Italians But it

was only reproduction