As he took his seat at the table, Mrs. Hubbard observed, that he probably had not seen such short-cake as Patsey made, in Rome—to which Charlie assented warmly. He had wished one evening, in Florence, he said, for some of his sister's short-cake, and a good cup of tea of her making; and the same night he dreamed that the Venus de Medicis had made him some. He was ashamed of himself for having had such a dream; but it could not be helped, such was the fact.
{"Venus de Medicis" = Famous nude statue of the Goddess Venus—a 1st Century BC copy of a lost Greek statue by Cleomenes of Athens—in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence}
Mrs. Hubbard thought no woman, Venus or not, ought to be ashamed of making good short-cake; if they were bad, that would be a different matter.
"Well, Charlie, now you have seen all those paintings and figures you used to talk so much about, what do you think of them?—are they really so handsome as you expected?" asked his sister.
"They are wonderful!" exclaimed Charlie, with animation; putting down a short-cake he had just buttered. "Wonderful!—There is no other word to describe them."
Mrs. Hubbard observed, that she had some notion of a painting, from the minister's portrait in the parlour—Charlie took up his short cake—she thought a person might have satisfaction in a painting; such a picture as that portrait; but as for those stone figures he used to wish to see, she could not understand what was the beauty of such idol-like things.
"They are not at all like idols, mother; they are the most noble conceptions of the human form."
How could they look human? He himself had told her they were made out of marble; just such marble, she supposed, as was used for tomb-stones.
"I only wish you could see some of the statues in Italy; the Laocoon, Niobe, and others I have seen. I think you would feel then what I felt—what I never can describe in words."
{"Laocoon" = A famous Greek statue, in the Vatican at Rome, of a Trojan priest and his two sons being crushed by serpents. "Niobe" = a famous statue, in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence (a Roman copy of a lost Greek original attributed to Scopas), of Niobe — in Greek mythology the daughter of Tantalus whose children were slaughtered by Zeus and who was transformed into a weeping image of stone}