Children are born there with a sense of beauty equally
delicate with any in the world, in whom it dies a lingering death of
smothered desire and pining, weary starvation. I know, because I have
felt it.--One in whom this sense has long been repressed, in coming
into Paris, feels a rustling and a waking within him, as if the soul
were trying to unfold her wings, long unused and mildewed. Instead of
scorning, then, the lighthearted, _mobile_, beauty-loving French,
would that we might exchange instructions with them--imparting our
severer discipline in religious lore, accepting their thorough methods
in art; and, teaching and taught, study together under the great
Master of all.
I went with M. Belloc into the gallery of antique sculpture. How
wonderful these old Greeks I What set them out on such a course, I
wonder--anymore, for instance, than the Sandwich Islanders? This
reminds me to tell you that in the Berlin Museum, which the King of
Prussia is now finishing in high style, I saw what is said to be the
most complete Egyptian collection in the world; a whole Egyptian
temple, word for word--pillars, paintings, and all; numberless
sarcophagi, and mummies _ad nauseam!_ They are no more fragrant
than the eleven thousand virgins, these mummies! and my stomach
revolts equally from the odor of sanctity and of science.
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