"The darkening and patching of the base of this masterpiece ... have obscured the beautiful motive, the river of wine, which was the principal item Titian had to illustrate. Pressed from heaped-up grapes by the Polyphemus-like figure upon the heights, the wine, trickling among the hollows of the hill, flows past the sleeping figure in the foreground, who still holds a cup, whilst her hair pours over a gilded jar with which she had come to gather wine; near her, a glass, half submerged by the rush of the current, sinks into the brook which flows past the revellers gathered at its brink to form into a pool from which a Satyr and a Silenus gather it in flasks and goblets. One of the revellers holds a crystal jar against the light; in the bay beyond a large foolish ship basks and lingers in the sun. Titian is here a prodigal of details so delicate and at times so homely that we are plunged into a feeling of amazed delight. On a few yards of painted cloth Titian has condensed all the inimitable magic of some other 'Midsummer Night's Dream.' These Dryads and Nymphs are at truce with Oberon and his fairy court, the most beautiful imaginings and recollections,—thoughts full of voluptuous melancholy, half thoughts, implied silences and visible sounds, each follows each, pauses and passes like the movement of some silent music played in the secret places of the mind. Titian has painted the very hum of the revel, he evokes in us a strange blend of emotions, and a sense of something which is fugitive in its essence, as time or pleasure, caught for this once and made perpetual."