Certainly, they both were very happy. Kenyon's genius, unconsciously
wrought upon by Hilda's influence, took a more delicate character than
heretofore. He modelled, among other things, a beautiful little statue
of maidenhood gathering a snowdrop. It was never put into marble,
however, because the sculptor soon recognized it as one of those fragile
creations which are true only to the moment that produces them, and
are wronged if we try to imprison their airy excellence in a permanent
material.
On her part, Hilda returned to her customary Occupations with a fresh
love for them, and yet with a deeper look into the heart of things; such
as those necessarily acquire who have passed from picture galleries into
dungeon gloom, and thence come back to the picture gallery again. It is
questionable whether she was ever so perfect a copyist thenceforth. She
could not yield herself up to the painter so unreservedly as in times
past; her character had developed a sturdier quality, which made her
less pliable to the influence of other minds. She saw into the picture
as profoundly as ever, and perhaps more so, but not with the devout
sympathy that had formerly given her entire possession of the old
master's idea. She had known such a reality, that it taught her to
distinguish inevitably the large portion that is unreal, in every work
of art. Instructed by sorrow, she felt that there is something beyond
almost all which pictorial genius has produced; and she never forgot
those sad wanderings from gallery to gallery, and from church to church,
where she had vainly sought a type of the Virgin Mother, or the Saviour,
or saint, or martyr, which a soul in extreme need might recognize as the
adequate one.
How, indeed, should she have found such? How could holiness be revealed
to the artist of an age when the greatest of them put genius and
imagination in the place of spiritual insight, and when, from the pope
downward, all Christendom was corrupt?
Meanwhile, months wore away, and Rome received back that large portion
of its life-blood which runs in the veins of its foreign and temporary
population. English visitors established themselves in the hotels, and
in all the sunny suites of apartments, in the streets convenient to
the Piazza di Spagna; the English tongue was heard familiarly along the
Corso, and English children sported in the Pincian Gardens.
The native Romans, on the other hand, like the butterflies and
grasshoppers, resigned themselves to the short, sharp misery which
winter brings to a people whose arrangements are made almost exclusively
with a view to summer. Keeping no fire within-doors, except possibly a
spark or two in the kitchen, they crept out of their cheerless houses
into the narrow, sunless, sepulchral streets, bringing their firesides
along with them, in the shape of little earthen pots, vases, or pipkins,
full of lighted charcoal and warm ashes, over which they held their
tingling finger-ends. Even in this half-torpid wretchedness, they still
seemed to dread a pestilence in the sunshine, and kept on the shady side
of the piazzas, as scrupulously as in summer. Through the open doorways
w no need to shut them when the weather within was bleaker than
without--a glimpse into the interior of their dwellings showed the
uncarpeted brick floors, as dismal as the pavement of a tomb.