Instead Of Scorning, Then, The Lighthearted, _Mobile_, Beauty-Loving French, Would That We Might Exchange Instructions With Them - Imparting Our Severer Discipline In Religious Lore, Accepting Their Thorough Methods In Art; And, Teaching And Taught, Study Together Under The Great Master Of All.

I went with M. Belloc into the gallery of antique sculpture.

How wonderful these old Greeks I What set them out on such a course, I wonder - anymore, for instance, than the Sandwich Islanders? This reminds me to tell you that in the Berlin Museum, which the King of Prussia is now finishing in high style, I saw what is said to be the most complete Egyptian collection in the world; a whole Egyptian temple, word for word - pillars, paintings, and all; numberless sarcophagi, and mummies _ad nauseam!_ They are no more fragrant than the eleven thousand virgins, these mummies! and my stomach revolts equally from the odor of sanctity and of science.

I saw there a mummy of a little baby; and though it was black as my shoe, and a disgusting, dry thing, nevertheless the little head was covered with fine, soft, auburn hair. Four thousand years ago, some mother thought the poor little thing a beauty. Also I saw mummies of cats, crocodiles, the ibis, and all the other religious _bijouterie_ of Egypt, with many cases of their domestic utensils, ornaments, &c.

The whole view impressed me with quite an idea of barbarism; much more so than the Assyrian collection. About the winged bulls there is a solemn and imposing grandeur; they have a mountainous and majestic nature. These Egyptian things give one an idea of inexpressible ungainliness. They had a clumsy, elephantine character of mind, these Egyptians. There was not wanting grace, but they seemed to pick it up accidentally; because among all possible forms some must be graceful. They had a kind of grand, mammoth civilization, gloomy and goblin. They seem to have floundered up out of Nile mud, like that old, slimy, pre-Adamite brood, the what's-their-name - _megalosaurus, ichthyosaurus, pterodactyle, iguanodon_, and other misshapen abominations, with now and then wreaths of lotus and water lilies round their tusks.

The human face, as represented in Assyrian sculptures, is a higher type of face than even the Greek: it is noble and princely; the Egyptian faces are broad, flat, and clumsy. If Egypt gave birth to Greece, with her beautiful arts, then truly this immense, clumsy roc's egg hatched a miraculous nest of loves and graces.

Among the antiques here, my two favorites are Venus de Milon, which I have described to you, and the Diane Chasseresse: this goddess is represented by the side of a stag; and so completely is the marble made alive, that one seems to perceive that a tread so airy would not bend a flower. Every side of the statue is almost equally graceful. The small, proud head is thrown back with the freedom of a stag; there is a gay, haughty self-reliance, an airy defiance, a rejoicing fulness of health and immortal youth in the whole figure. You see before you the whole Greek conception of an immortal - a creature full of intellect, full of the sparkle and elixir of existence, in whom the principle of life seems to be crystallized and concentrated with a dazzling abundance; light, airy, incapable alike of love and of sympathy; living for self, and self only. Alas for poor souls, who, in the heavy anguish of life, had only such goddesses to go to! How far in advance is even the idolatry of Christianity! how different the idea of Mary from the Diana!

Yet, as I walked up and down among these remains of Greek art, I could not but wonder at the spectacle of their civilization: no modern development reproduces it, nor ever can or will. It is well to cherish and make much of that ethereal past, as a specimen of one phase of humanity, for it is past _forever_. Those isles of Greece, with their gold and purple haze of light and shadow, their exquisite, half-spiritual, half-bodily formation - islands where flesh and blood became semi-spiritual, and where the sense of beauty was an existence - have passed as a vision of glory, never to return. One scarcely realizes how full of poetry was their mythology; all successive ages have drawn on it for images of beauty without exhausting it; and painters and artists, to this day, are fettered and repressed by vain efforts to reproduce it. But as a religion for the soul and the heart, all this is vain and void; all powerless to give repose or comfort. One who should seek repose on the bosom of such a mythology is as one who seeks to pillow himself on the many-tinted clouds of evening; soft and beautiful as they are, there is nothing real to them but their dampness and coldness.

Here M. and Madame Belloc entered, and as he wanted my opinion of the Diane, I let her read this part of the letter to him in French. You ought to have seen M. Belloc, with tears in his eyes, defending the old Greeks, and expounding to me, with all manner of rainbow illustrations, the religious meanings of Greek mythology, and the _morale_ of Greek tragedy. Such a whole souled devotion to a nation dead and gone could never be found but in France.

Madame Belloc was the translator of Maria Edgeworth by that lady's desire; corresponded with her for years, and still has many of her letters. Her translation of Uncle Tom has to me all the merit and all the interest of an original composition. In perusing it I enjoy the pleasure of reading the story with scarce any consciousness of its ever having been mine. In the evening Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall called. They are admirably matched - he artist, she author. The one writes stories, the other illustrates them. Madame M. also called. English by birth, she is a true _Parisienne,_ or, rather, seems to have both minds, as she speaks both languages, perfectly.

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