We Swarm To Its Galleries In Every Variety Of Nationality, With
Guide-Books In Every Tongue, And We Are Very Queer, For The Most Part,
To Any One Of Our Number Who Can Sufficiently Exteriorate Himself To Get
The Rest Of Us In Perspective.
It is probably well that most of us do
not stagger under any great knowledge of the crushing history of the
place, which has been the scene of the most terrible experiences of the
race, the most touching, the most august.
Provisionally ignorant, at
least, we begin to appear at the earliest practicable hour before the
outermost stairway of the Vatican, and, while the Swiss Guards still
have on their long, blue cloaks to keep their black and yellow legs
warm, mount to the Sistine Chapel. Here we help instruct one another, as
we stand about or sit about in twos and threes or larger groups, reading
aloud from our polyglot Baedekers while we join in identifying the
different facts. Here, stupendously familiar, whether we have seen it
before or not, is Michelangelo's giant fresco of the Judgment, as
prodigious as we imagined or remembered it; here are his mighty Prophets
and his mighty Sibyls; and here below them, in incomparably greater
charm, are the frescos of Botticelli, with the grace of his Primavera
playing through them all like a strain of music and taking the soul with
joy.
It is the same crowd in the Raphael Stanze, but rather silenter, for by
now we have taught ourselves enough from our Baedekers at least to read
them under our breaths, and we talk low before the frescos and the
canvases.
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