Oct. 20th. Sunday.—I went with M. Stuntz to hear a grand mass at the royal chapel.
21st.—It rained this morning:—went to the gallery, and amused myself for two hours walking up and down the rooms, sometimes pausing upon my favourite pictures, sometimes abandoned to the reveries suggested by these glorious creations of the human intellect.
'Twas like the bright procession
Of skiey visions in a solemn dream,
From which men wake as from a paradise,
And draw fresh strength to tread the thorns of life!
While looking at the Castor and Pollux of Rubens, I remembered what the biographers asserted of this most wonderful man—that he spoke fluently seven languages, besides being profoundly skilled in many sciences, and one of the most accomplished diplomatists of his time. Before he took up his palette in the morning, he was accustomed to read, or hear read, some fine passages out of the ancient poets; and thus releasing his soul from the trammels of low-thoughted care, he let her loose into the airy regions of imagination.
What Goethe says of poets, must needs be applicable to painters. He says, "If we look only at the principal productions of a poet, and neglect to study himself, his character, and the circumstances with which he had to contend, we fall into a sort of atheism, which forgets the Creator in his creation."