The Earlier Gods Might Have
Been The Devils Which The Early Christians Fancied Them, But They Did
Not Look It;
They did not look as if it was they that had loosed the
terrors upon mankind out of which the
True faith has but barely
struggled at last, now when its relaxing grasp seems slipping from the
human mind. I remembered those peaceful pagans so perfectly that I could
have gone confidently to this or that and hailed him friend; and though
I might not have liked to claim the acquaintance of all of them in the
flesh, in the marble I fled to it as refuge from the cruel visions of
Christian art. If this is perhaps saying too much, I wish also to hedge
from the wholesale censure of my fellow-sight-seers which I may have
seemed to imply. They did not prevail so clutteringly in the sculpture
galleries as in the Sistine Chapel and the Stanze. One could have the
statues as much to one's self as one liked; there were courts with
murmuring fountains in them; and there was a view of Rome from a certain
window, where no fellow-tourist intruded between one and the innumerable
roofs and domes and towers, and the heights beyond whose snows there was
nothing but blue sky. It was a beautiful morning, with a sun mild as
English summer, which did not prevent the afternoon from turning cold
with wind and raining and hailing and snowing. This in turn did not keep
off a fine red sunset, with an evening star of glittering silver that
brightened as the sunset faded.
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