I went to bed and rose at nine, and she was sitting at breakfast with the rest of the family, playing as good a knife and fork as her sisters, though, I must admit, with an expression of sincere melancholy in her countenance.
The scene, I am told by my friend the consul, was perfectly German. They eat a great deal, he says, in affliction. The poet writes:—
“They are the silent griefs which cut the heart-strings.”
For silent read hungry.
The Upper Belvidere, a palace containing eighteen large rooms, filled with pictures. This is the imperial gallery and the first in Austria. How can I give you an idea of perhaps five hundred masterpieces you see here now, and by whom Italy has been stripped. They have bought up all Flanders, one would think, too. In one room here are twenty-eight superb Vandykes. Austria, in fact, has been growing rich while every other nation on the continent has been growing poor, and she has purchased the treasures of half the world at a discount.[[4]]
It is wearisome writing of pictures, one’s language is so limited. I must mention one or two in this collection, however, and I will let you off entirely on the Esterhazy, which is nearly as fine.
“Cleopatra dying.” She is represented younger than usual, and with a more fragile and less queenly style of beauty than is common. It is a fair slight creature of seventeen, who looks made to depend for her very breath upon affection, and is dying of a broken heart. It is painted with great feeling, and with a soft and delightful tone of colour which is peculiar to the artist. It is the third of Guido Cagnacci’s pictures that I have seen. One was the gem of a gallery at Bologna, and was bought last summer by Mr. Cabot of Boston.
“The wife of Potiphar” is usually represented as a woman of middle age, with a full, voluptuous person. She is so drawn, I remember, in the famous picture in the Barberini Palace at Rome, said to be the most expressive thing of its kind in the world. Here is a painting less dangerously expressive of passion but full of beauty. She is eighteen at the most, fair, delicate, and struggles with the slender boy, who seems scarce older than herself, more like a sister from whom a mischievous brother has stolen something in sport. Her partly disclosed figure has all the incomplete slightness of a girl. The handsome features of Joseph express more embarrassment than anger. The habitual courtesy to his lovely mistress is still there, his glance is just averted from the snowy bosom toward which he is drawn, but in the firmly curved lip the sense of duty sits clearly defined, and evidently will triumph. I have forgotten the painter’s name. His model must have been some innocent girl whose modest beauty led him away from his subject. Called by another name the picture were perfect.
A portrait of Count Wallenstein, by Vandyke. It looks a man, in the fullest sense of the word. The pendant to it is the Countess Turentaxis, and she is a woman he might well have loved—calm, lofty, and pure. They are pictures, I should think, would have an influence on the character of those who saw them habitually.