She would not have banished one of those grim popes, who sit each over

his own tomb, scattering cold benedictions out of their marble hands;

nor a single frozen sister of the Allegoric family, to whom--as, like

hired mourners at an English funeral, it costs them no wear and tear of

heart--is assigned the office of weeping for the dead. If you choose to

see these things, they present themselves; if you deem them unsuitable

and out of place, they vanish, individually, but leave their life upon

the walls.

The pavement! it stretched out illimitably, a plain of many-colored

marble, where thousands of worshippers might kneel together, and

shadowless angels tread among them without brushing their heavenly

garments against those earthly ones. The roof! the dome! Rich, gorgeous,

filled with sunshine, cheerfully sublime, and fadeless after

centuries, those lofty depths seemed to translate the heavens to mortal

comprehension, and help the spirit upward to a yet higher and wider

sphere. Must not the faith, that built this matchless edifice, and

warmed, illuminated, and overflowed from it, include whatever can

satisfy human aspirations at the loftiest, or minister to human

necessity at the sorest? If Religion had a material home, was it not

here?

As the scene which we but faintly suggest shone calmly before the New

England maiden at her entrance, she moved, as if by very instinct, to

one of the vases of holy water, upborne against a column by two mighty

cherubs. Hilda dipped her fingers, and had almost signed the cross upon

her breast, but forbore, and trembled, while shaking the water from her

finger-tips. She felt as if her mother's spirit, somewhere within

the dome, were looking down upon her child, the daughter of Puritan

forefathers, and weeping to behold her ensnared by these gaudy

superstitions. So she strayed sadly onward, up the nave, and towards the

hundred golden lights that swarm before the high altar. Seeing a woman;

a priest, and a soldier kneel to kiss the toe of the brazen St. Peter,

who protrudes it beyond his pedestal for the purpose, polished bright

with former salutations, while a child stood on tiptoe to do the same,

the glory of the church was darkened before Hilda's eyes. But again she

went onward into remoter regions. She turned into the right transept,

and thence found her way to a shrine, in the extreme corner of the

edifice, which is adorned with a mosaic copy of Guido's beautiful

Archangel, treading on the prostrate fiend.

This was one of the few pictures, which, in these dreary days, had not

faded nor deteriorated in Hilda's estimation; not that it was better

than many in which she no longer took an interest; but the subtile

delicacy of the painter's genius was peculiarly adapted to her

character. She felt, while gazing at it, that the artist had done a

great thing, not merely for the Church of Rome, but for the cause of

Good. The moral of the picture, the immortal youth and loveliness of

virtue, and its irresistibles might against ugly Evil, appealed as much

to Puritans as Catholics.




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