With the passage through the Church of St. Peter the knight began the fair race through immortality. The Princess let herself be bound by the tie of art to the circle of the men. As Albano was more smitten with edifices than with any other work of art, so did he see from afar with holy awe the long mountain-chain of art, which again bore upon itself hills; so did he stand before the plain, around which two enormous colonnades run like Corsos, bearing a people of statues; in the centre shoots up the obelisk, and on its right and left an eternal fountain, and from the lofty steps the proud church of the world, inwardly filled with churches, rearing upon itself a temple toward heaven, looks down upon the earth. But how enormously, as they drew near, had its columns and its rocky wall mounted up and flown away from the vision!
He entered the magic church, which gave the world blessings, curses, kings, and popes, with the consciousness that, like the world-edifice, it was continually enlarging and receding more and more, the longer one remained in it. They went up to two children of white marble, who held an incense-muscle-shell of yellow marble; the children grew by nearness till they were giants. At length they stood before the main altar and its hundred perpetual lamps;—what a stillness! Above them the heaven's arch of the dome, resting on four inner towers; around them an overarched city, of four streets, in which stood churches. The temple became greatest by walking in it; and when they passed round one column, there stood a new one before them, and holy giants gazed earnestly down. Here was the youth's large heart, after so long a time, filled. "In no art," he said to his father, "is the soul so mightily possessed with the sublime as in architecture; in every other the giant stands in it and in the depths of the soul, but here he stands out of it and close before it." Dian, to whom all images were more clear than abstract ideas, said: "He is perfectly right." Fraischdörfer replied: "The sublimity here also lies only in the brain: for the whole church stands, after all, in something greater, namely, in Rome, and under the heavens, in the presence of which latter we certainly should not feel anything." He also complained, "That the place for the sublime in his head was very much narrowed by the innumerable volutes and monuments which the temple shut up therein at the same time with itself." Gaspard said, taking everything in a large sense: "When the sublime once really appears, it then, by its very nature, absorbs and annihilates all little circumstantial ornaments." He adduced as evidence the tower of the minster,[[79]] and nature itself, which is not made smaller by its grasses and villages.
The Princess, among so many connoisseurs of art, enjoyed in silence.
The ascent of the dome Gaspard recommended to defer to a dry and cloudless day, in order that they might behold the queen of the world, Rome, upon and from the proper throne; he therefore proposed very earnestly the visiting of the Pantheon, because he was eager to let this follow immediately after the impression of St. Peter's Church. They went thither. How simply and grandly the Hall opens upon one! Eight yellow columns sustain its brow, and majestically, as the head of the Homeric Jupiter, its temple arches itself! It is the Rotunda or Pantheon. "O the pygmies," cried Albano, "who would fain give us new temples! Raise the old ones higher out of the rubbish, and then you have built enough."[[80]] They stepped in; there reared itself around them a holy, simple, free world-structure with its heavenly arches soaring and striving upward, an odeum of the tones of the sphere-music, a world in the world! And overhead[[81]] the eye-socket of the light and of the sky gleamed down, and the distant rack of clouds seemed to touch the lofty arch over which it shot along! And round about them stood nothing but the temple-bearers, the columns! The temple of all gods endured and concealed the diminutive altars of the later ones.
Gaspard questioned Albano about his impressions. He said he preferred the larger church of St. Peter. The Knight approved, and said that "youth, like nations, always more easily found and better appreciated the sublime than the beautiful, and that the spirit of the young man ripened from strength to beauty, as his body ripens from beauty to strength; however, he himself preferred the Pantheon." "How could the moderns," said the Counsellor of Arts, Fraischdörfer, "build anything, except some little Bernini's towers?" "That is why," said the offended Provincial Architect, Dian, who despised the Counsellor of Arts, because he never made a good figure, except in the æsthetic hall of judgment as critic, never in the exhibition-hall as painter, "we moderns are, beyond contradiction, stronger in criticism, though in practice we are collectively and individually blockheads." Bouverot remarked, "The Corinthian columns might be higher." The Counsellor of Arts said, "After all, he knew nothing more like this fine hemisphere than a much smaller one, which he had found in Herculaneum, moulded in ashes—of the bosom of a fair fugitive." The Knight laughed, and Albano turned away in disgust, and went to the Princess.
He asked her for her opinion about the two temples. "Here Sophocles, there Shakespeare; but I comprehend and appreciate Sophocles more easily," she replied, and looked with new eyes into his new countenance. For the supernatural illumination through the zenith of Heaven—not through a hazy horizon—transfigured in her eyes the beautiful and excited countenance of the youth, and she took for granted that the saintly halo of the dome must also exalt her form. When he answered her: "Very good! But in Shakespeare Sophocles also is contained; not, however, Shakespeare in Sophocles; and on Peter's Church stands Angelo's rotunda!" Just then the lofty cloud all at once, as by the blow of a hand out of the ether, broke in two, and the ravished sun, like the eye of a Venus, floating through her ancient heavens,—for she once stood even here,—looked mildly in from the upper deep; then a holy radiance filled the temple, and burned on the porphyry of the pavement, and Albano looked around him in an ecstasy of wonder and delight, and said, with low voice: "How transfigured at this moment is everything in this sacred place! Raphael's spirit comes forth from his grave in this noontide hour, and everything which its reflection touches brightens into godlike splendor!" The Princess looked upon him tenderly, and he lightly laid his hand upon hers, and said, as one vanquished, "Sophocles!"
On the next moonlit evening Gaspard bespoke torches, in order that the Colosseum with its giant-circle might, the first time, stand in fire before them. The Knight would fain have gone around alone with his son dimly through the dim work, like two spirits of the olden time, but the Princess forced herself upon him, from a too lively wish to share with the noble youth his moments,—and perhaps, in fact, to have her heart and his own common property. Women do not sufficiently comprehend that an idea, when it fills and elevates man's mind, shuts it up against love, and crowds out persons, whereas with woman all ideas easily become human beings.
They passed over the Forum by the Via Sacra to the Colosseum, whose lofty, cloven forehead looked down pale under the moonlight. They stood before the gray rock-walls, which reared themselves on four colonnades, one above another, and the flames shot up into the arches of the arcades, gilding the green shrubbery high overhead; and deep in the earth had the noble monster already buried his feet. They stepped in, and ascended the mountain full of fragments of rock, from one seat of the spectators to another; Gaspard did not venture to the sixth, or highest, where the men used to stand, but Albano and the Princess did. Then the youth gazed down over the cliffs, upon the round, green crater of the burnt-out volcano, which once swallowed nine thousand beasts at once, and which quenched itself with human blood; the lurid glare of the flames penetrated into the clefts and caverns, and among the foliage of the ivy and laurel, and among the great shadows of the moon, which, like recluses, kept themselves in cells; toward the south, where the streams of centuries and barbarians had stormed in, stood single columns and bare arcades,—temples and three palaces had the giant fed and lined with his limbs, and still, with all his wounds, he looked out livingly into the world.
"What a world!" said Albano. "Here coiled the giant snake five times about Christianity! Like a smile of scorn lies the moonlight down below there upon the green arena, where once stood the colossus of the sun-god. The star of the north[[82]] glimmers low through the windows, and the serpent and the bear crouch. What a world has gone by!" The Princess answered, that twelve thousand prisoners built this theatre, and that a great many more had bled in it. "O, we too have building prisoners," said he, "but for fortifications; and blood, too, still flows, but with sweat! No, we have no present; the past without it must bring forth a future."
The Princess went off to break a laurel-twig and pluck a blooming wall-flower. Albano sank away into musing,—the autumnal wind of the past swept over the stubble,—on this holy eminence he saw the constellations, Rome's green hills, the glimmering city, the Pyramid of Cestius; but all became past, and on the twelve hills dwelt, as upon graves, the lofty old spirits, and looked sternly into the age as if they were still its kings and judges.