at the main altar and its hundred perpetual lamps. What a place! Above them the heaven's arch of the dome, resting on four inner towers; around them an over-arched city of four streets in which stood churches. The temple became greatest by walking in it; and, when they passed round one column, there stood a new one before them, and holy giants gazed earnestly down.
Here was the youth's large heart, after so long a time, filled. "In no art," said he to his father, "is the soul so mightily possessed with the sublime as in architecture; in every other the giant stands within and in the depths of the soul, but here he stands out of and close before it." Dian, to whom all images were more clear than abstract ideas, said he was perfectly right. Fraischdörfer replied, "The sublime also here lies only in the brain, for the whole church stands, after all, in something greater, namely, in Rome, and under the heavens; in the presence of which latter we certainly should not feel anything." He also complained that "the place for the sublime in his head was very much narrowed by the innumerable volutes and monuments which the temple shut up therein at the same time with itself." Gaspard, taking everything in a large sense, remarked, "When the sublime once really appears, it then, by its very nature, absorbs and annihilates all little circumstantial ornaments." He adduced as evidence the tower of the Minster,[1] and Nature itself, which is not made smaller by its grasses and villages.
Among so many connoisseurs of art, the Princess enjoyed in silence.
The ascent of the dome Gaspard recommended to defer to a dry and cloudless day, in order that they might behold the queen of the world, Rome, upon and from the proper throne; he therefore proposed, very zealously, the visiting of the Pantheon, because he was eager to let this follow immediately after the impression of Saint Peter's church. They went thither. How simply and grandly the hall
- ↑ Strasburg.
