They are vast
harps through which wandering breezes murmur aeolian melodies,
"morning and evening anthems" to the Creator. His paintings have
a freshness and fragrance of the dawn; a mystery seems to hang
over them. The very spirit of the morn broods over that classic
landscape of his "Dante and Vergil." In the opening words of
Dame's Inferno he gives us the vivid setting of this wonderful
scene:
"Midway upon the journey of life he found himself within a
forest dark, for the straight forward pathway had been lost. He
wandered all night and in the morning found himself near the
foot of a mountain. He began the ascent but was met by a
panther, light and exceedingly swift. He was about to return,
but the time was the beginning of morning. A lion with uplifted
head, and a hungry she-wolf next he spied and rushed down toward
the lowlands where he beheld Vergil, who has come to guide him
to his beloved Beatrice."
One should pause to view the "Master Smith." One here sees in
very form the character Longfellow so clearly describes in his
"Village Blacksmith." It is to the eye what the melody of the
poem is to the ear, purest harmony that ever sings the dignity
of labor.
One should also pause to admire the "Sphinx" by Elihu Vedder,
"The Misses Boit" by Sargent, Winslow Homer's "Fog Warning,"
John W. Alexander's "Isabella and the Pot of Basil." This last
picture we love not only as a work of art but because it is the
subject of one of Keat's poems, "Isabel."
Isabella was a beautiful Florentine maiden who lived with her
two brothers. "They planned to marry her to some high noble and
his olive trees." A certain servant, Lorenzo, loved her, and
they had him taken to a forest beyond the Arno and murdered.
Isabella had a dream in which Lorenzo appeared to her and told
of his murder and how to find his grave. In the morning she
found the grave and took the skull and kissed it. "Then in a
silken scarf she wrapped it up, and for its tomb did choose a
garden-pot wherein she laid it by, and covered it with mold, and
o'er set Sweet Basil, which her tears kept wet." Her brothers
discovered why she sat so constant by her pot of Basil and fled
from the city. Isabella pined and died with these pitiful words
upon her lips: "O cruelty, to steal my Basil-pot away from me."
Space forbids us to tell of the many beautiful works of art or
the inspiration to be had by contemplating them, but a trip to
Boston is not complete unless we take away lasting memories of
the famous masterpieces to be seen here.
While visiting the university buildings of Harvard we saw the
photographs of men who had sacrificed their lives during the
World War.
