We went first among some antique marbles,--busts, statues, terminal gods,
with several of the Roman emperors among them. We saw here the bust
whence Haydon took his ugly and ridiculous likeness of Nero,--a foolish
thing to do. Julius Caesar was there, too, looking more like a modern
old man than any other bust in the series. Perhaps there may be a
universality in his face, that gives it this independence of race and
epoch. We glimpsed along among the old marbles,--Elgin and others, which
are esteemed such treasures of art;--the oddest fragments, many of them
smashed by their fall from high places, or by being pounded to pieces by
barbarians, or gnawed away by time; the surface roughened by being rained
upon for thousands of years; almost always a nose knocked off; sometimes
a headless form; a great deficiency of feet and hands,--poor, maimed
veterans in this hospital of incurables. The beauty of the most perfect
of them must be rather guessed at, and seen by faith, than with the
bodily eye; to look at the corroded faces and forms is like trying to see
angels through mist and cloud. I suppose nine tenths of those who seem
to be in raptures about these fragments do not really care about them;
neither do I. And if I were actually moved, I should doubt whether it
were by the statues or by my own fancy.
We passed, too, through Assyrian saloons and Egyptian saloons,--all full
of monstrosities and horrible uglinesses, especially the Egyptian, and
all the innumerable relics that I saw of them in these saloons, and among
the mummies, instead of bringing me closer to them, removed me farther
and farther; there being no common ground of sympathy between them and
us.
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