XXXIX
FORT HAMILTON, LONG ISLAND, July 30, '46.
My dear Friend,—It is very shabby, but I have been so unexpectedly and constantly separated from my manuscripts that I cannot copy, as I hoped, some of my verses. I have but one more day on land, and more than I can well do in it.
Could you hear how the sea moans and roars in the moonlight at this moment, it would be a siren song to draw you far away. I strain my eyes over the water as one struggles to comprehend the end of life, but the beauty of the future lies unseen and untouched.
God bless you always, my dear Friend; and do not fail to write me often.
Affly. yr friend,
G.W.C.
XL
ROME, November 22d, 1846.
My dear Friend,—Italy is no fable, and the wonderful depth of purity in the air and blue in the sky constantly makes real all the hopes of our American imagination. Sometimes the sky is an intensely blue and distant arch, and sometimes it melts in the sunlight and lies pale and rare and delicate upon the eye, so that one feels that he is breathing the sky and moving in it. The memory of a week is full of pictures of this atmospheric beauty. I looked from a lofty balcony at the Vatican upon broad gardens lustrously green with evergreen and box and orange trees, in whose dusk gleamed the large planets of golden fruit. Palms, and the rich, rounding tuft of Italian pines, and the solemn shafts of cypresses, stood beside fountains which spouted rainbows into the air, which was silver-clear and transparent, and on which the outline of the landscape was drawn as vividly as a flame against the sky at night. Beside me rose floating into the air the dome of St. Peter's, which is not a nucleus of the city, like the Duomo of Florence, but a crown more majestic and imposing as the spectator is farther removed. I had come to this balcony and its realm of sunny silence through the proper palace of the "Apollo" and the "Laocoon" and Raphael's "Transfiguration" and "Stanze." The Vatican is a wilderness of art and association, and in the allotted three hours I could only wander through the stately labyrinth and arrange the rooms, but not their contents, in my mind, but could not escape the "Apollo," which stands alone in a small cabinet opening upon a garden and fountain. It was greater to me than the "Venus de Medici" at Florence, although it has taught me better to appreciate that when I see it again. It is cold and pure and vast, the imagination of a man in the Divine Mind, given to marble because flesh was too recreant a material. The air of the statue is proudly commanding, with disdain that is not human, and a quiet consciousness of power. It does not resemble any figure we see of a man who has drawn a bow, but the ideal of a man in action. Like the "Venus," it shows how entire was the possible abstraction of the old Sculptors into a region of pure form as an expression of what was beyond human passion, with which color seems to correspond. Deities are properly the subject of sculpture because of color; colorless purity of marble accords with the divine superiority to human passion, and although the mythology degraded the gods into the sphere and influence of men, to the mind of the artist they would still sit upon unstained thrones.