". . . There she stands
As if alive"
—the picture is a wonder!
Still the visitor sits dumb. Was it from human lips that those words had just now sounded: "Then all smiles stopped together"?
She stands there—smiling . . . But the Duke grows weary of this pause before Frà Pandolf's piece. It is a wonder; but he has other wonders. Moreover, the due hint has been given, and no doubt, though necessarily in silence, taken: the next Duchess will be instructed beforehand in the proper way to "thank men." He intimates his will to move away:
"Will't please you rise? We'll meet
The company below, then."
The envoy rises, but not shakes off that horror of repulsion. Somewhere, as he stands up and steps aside, a voice seems prating of "the Count his master's known munificence," of "just pretence to dowry," of the "fair daughter's self" being nevertheless the object. . . . But in a hot resistless impulse, he turns off; one must remove one's self from such proximity. Same air shall not be breathed, nor same ground trod. . . . Still the voice pursues him, sharply a little now for his lack of the due deference:
". . . Nay, we'll go
Together down, sir,"
—and slowly (since a rupture must not be brought about by him) the envoy acquiesces. They begin to descend the staircase. But the visitor has no eyes for "wonders" now—he has seen the wonder, has heard the horror. . . . His host is all unwitting. Strange, that the guest can pass these glories, but everybody is not a connoisseur. One of them, however, must be pointed out:
". . . Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me."