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.




readonlinefreebook.com Copyright 2016 - 2024