Italian hours . to its not for sculpture not professedly to pro-duce any emotion producible by painting. There are numbers ofsmall and delicate fragments of bas-reliefs of exquisite grace, anda huge piece (two combatants — one, on horseback, beating downanother — murder made eternal and beautiful) attributed to theParthenon and certainly as grandly impressive as anything in theElgin marbles. S. W. suggested again the Roman villas as a sub-ject. Excellent if one could find a feast of facts a la Stendhal. Alot of vague ecstatic descriptions and anecdotes would nt at allpay. There have been too m
Italian hours . to its not for sculpture not professedly to pro-duce any emotion producible by painting. There are numbers ofsmall and delicate fragments of bas-reliefs of exquisite grace, anda huge piece (two combatants — one, on horseback, beating downanother — murder made eternal and beautiful) attributed to theParthenon and certainly as grandly impressive as anything in theElgin marbles. S. W. suggested again the Roman villas as a sub-ject. Excellent if one could find a feast of facts a la Stendhal. Alot of vague ecstatic descriptions and anecdotes would nt at allpay. There have been too many already. Enough facts are re-corded, I suppose; one should discover them and soak in them fora twelvemonth. And yet a Roman villa, in spite of statues, ideasand atmosphere, affects me as of a scanter human and socialportee, a shorter, thinner reverberation, than an old Englishcountry-house, round which experience seems piled so this perhaps is either hair-splitting or racial prejudice. [ 292 ]. ENTRANCE TO THi; VA ITCAN, ROME. FROM A ROMAN NOTE-BOOK March gth. — The Vatican is still deadly cold; a couple ofhours there yesterday with R. W. E. Yet he, illustrious andenviable man, fresh from the East, had no overcoat and wantednone. Perfect bliss, I think, would be to live in Rome withoutthinking of overcoats. The Vatican seems very familiar, butstrangely smaller than of old. I never lost the sense before of con-fusing vastness. Sancta simplicitas ! All my old friends howeverstand there in undimmed radiance, keeping most of them theirold pledges. I am perhaps more struck now with the enormousamount of padding — the number of third-rate, fourth-rate thingsthat weary the eye desirous to approach freshly the twenty andthirty best. In spite of the padding there are dozens of treasuresthat one passes regretfully; but the impression of the whole placeis the great thing — the feeling that through these solemn vistasflows the source of an incalculable part of our p
Size: 1391px × 1796px
Photo credit: © The Reading Room / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, bookpublisherbostonnewyorkhough
