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.

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