All the space on the walls or pilasters not covered with paintings is of a pale red stucco, with small gold mouldings. The execution seems thoroughly finished and excellent.
I dined at the Portuguese Ambassador’s. Our dinner was very near ending like Prince Schwartzenberg’s at Paris. One of Rundell and Bridge’s beautiful brilliant silver girandoles came too near the curtain, which immediately blazed up. The flames were extinguished by the Spanish Ambassador; a fact which may afford matter for witticisms to the newspapers, in the present political conjuncture.
I drove half a post further in the streets, late at night, to see the tower of St. Giles’s church, whose new bright-red illuminated clock-face shines like a magnificent star in the dark.
I found your letter at home, with all sorts of affectionate reproaches for my neglect of our own interests for indifferent things. Even were this sometimes the case, you must not think that my heart is the less filled with you. The rose, too, sometimes yields a stronger, sometimes a weaker perfume; nay, sometimes there is not a flower on the bush; in their season they bud and blossom again—but the nature of the plant is always the same.
Herder’s prayer is beautiful—but it is not applicable to this earth; for though it is true that God’s sun shines on the evil and on the good, it is equally true that His thunderbolt strikes the good and the evil. Each must protect himself from calamity, with all the wisdom and the courage he is endowed with.
Men are wearisome to you, you say. Oh, Heaven! how wearisome are they to me! When one has lived so long in the interchange of all feelings and all thoughts, the intercourse with the ‘banal’ unsympathizing world is more than empty and tasteless.
Your hypothesis, that two kindred souls will, in another world, melt into one existence, is very pretty—but I should not like to be united to you in that manner. One being must, indeed, love itself; but the mutual love of two is voluntary, and that alone has value. Let us therefore hope to meet again, but to be one, as we are now,—one only in mutual love and truth.
One of the many currents of this great stream carried me into the Annual Exhibition of Pictures. In historical pictures there was little to delight the lover of art. Some portraits by Sir Thomas Lawrence showed, as all his do, his great genius, and at the same time his carelessness. He finishes only particular parts, and daubs over the remainder in such a manner that it must be looked at from a distance, like scene-painting. The great masters of the art painted not so, when they devoted their talents to portrait painting.
In landscapes, on the other hand, there was much that was attractive.
First, The Dead Elephant.—The scene is a wild mountain-district in the interior of India. Strange gigantic trees and luxuriant tangled thickets surround a dark lake. A dead elephant lies stretched on its shore, and a crocodile, opening its wide jaws and displaying its frightful teeth, is seen climbing up the huge body, driving away a monstrous bird of prey, and menacing the other crocodiles which are eagerly swimming across the lake to their repast. Vultures are poised on the branches of the trees, and the head of a tiger glares from the jungle. On the other side are seen three still more formidable predatory animals,—English hunters, whose guns are pointed at the great crocodile, and will soon excite more terrific confusion among this terrific group.