The spectacle of so much existence,
individual or national, to which these pledges bore witness, ended by
numbing his senses--the purpose with which he entered the shop was
fulfilled. He had left the real behind, and had climbed gradually up
to an ideal world; he had attained to the enchanted palace of ecstasy,
whence the universe appeared to him by fragments and in shapes of
flame, as once the future blazed out before the eyes of St. John in
Patmos.
A crowd of sorrowing faces, beneficent and appalling, dark and
luminous, far and near, gathered in numbers, in myriads, in whole
generations. Egypt, rigid and mysterious, arose from her sands in the
form of a mummy swathed in black bandages; then the Pharaohs swallowed
up nations, that they might build themselves a tomb; and he beheld
Moses and the Hebrews and the desert, and a solemn antique world.
Fresh and joyous, a marble statue spoke to him from a twisted column
of the pleasure-loving myths of Greece and Ionia. Ah! who would not
have smiled with him to see, against the earthen red background, the
brown-faced maiden dancing with gleeful reverence before the god
Priapus, wrought in the fine clay of an Etruscan vase? The Latin queen
caressed her chimera.
Pages:
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35