Our Acquaintance Quickly Ripened Into The
Affectionate Friendship Which Became A Tender Regret When We Looked Our
Last Upon It; And Vast As It Was, It Was Never Too Large For Our
Embrace.
I doubt if there was a moment in our fortnight's devotion when
we thought the doughty canons, its brave-
Spoken founders, "mad to have
undertaken it," as they said they expected people to think, or any
moment when we did not revere them for imagining a temple at once so
beautiful and so big.
Our first visit was redeemed from the commonplace of our duty-round of
the side-chapels by two things which I can remember without the help of
my notes. One, and the great one, was Murillo's "Vision of St. Anthony,"
in which the painter has most surpassed himself, and which not to have
seen, Gautier says, is not to have known the painter. It is so glorious
a masterpiece, with the Child joyously running down from the clustering
angels toward the kneeling saint in the nearest corner of the
foreground, that it was distinctly a moment before I realized that the
saint had once been cut out of his corner and sent into an incredible
exile in America, and then munificently restored to it, though the seam
in the canvas only too literally attested the incident. I could not well
say how this fact then enhanced the interest of the painting, and then
how it ceased from the consciousness, which it must always recur to with
any remembrance of it.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 238 of 376
Words from 65187 to 65443
of 103320
