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They are children of a wise generation, harassed and thoughtful, in which men who have won equality and the freedom of thought, and of shaping each for himself his religion, rank, and fortune, wish to find in art the expression of their anxieties and meditations. They are a thousand leagues away from the first masters, workmen or cavaliers, who lived out-of-doors, scarcely read at all, and thought only of giving a feast for their eyes. It is for that that I love them; I feel like them because I am of their century. Sympathy is the best source of admiration and pleasure.
III.
Below the museum is a square tower enclosed by a gallery of slender columns, which towards the top bend and are cut into trefoils, forming a border of arcades. They have gathered under this gallery all the antiquities of the country: fragments of Roman statues, severe busts of emperors, ascetic virgins of the middle ages, bas-reliefs from churches and temples, knights of stone lying all armed upon their tombs. The court was deserted and silent; tall slender trees, tufted shrubbery, were bright with the loveliest green. A dazzling sunlight fell on the red tiles of the gallery; an old fountain, loaded with little columns and heads of animals, murmured near to a bench of rose-veined marble. A statue of a young man was seen amidst the branches; stems of green hops climbed up around broken columns.
