Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. II.djvu/26

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LIFE IN THE OLD WORLD.

siastical structure, appears to me like an image of the supplicating or the worshiping congregation; the church tower or towers, are its extended hands. The interior of the church, especially the interiors of the large Catholic churches, corresponds to the inner world of Christianity and the spiritual organism—in conformity with their deeply significant type, the Mosaic ark of the testimony. Every individual Christian finds also in it, an image of the temple of his own soul, with an outer court, a sanctuary, and a holy of holies, where the cherubim watch over the Word of the Eternal God; and where the awakened eye can read in the symbolic, plastic writing of the church, the doctrine of revelation. The tower of Pisa is to me like a word from this doctrine; no longer a leaning tower, but an image of a sinner who raises himself, or is raised up by the invisible, who dwells above and in the light.

Campo Santo is a magnificent museum of tombs, interesting rather with reference to historical art, than for the beauty of its works of art. For the greater number of these are mutilated or belong to a class of art long since dead and gone, as for example; Orgagna's large frescoes of heaven and hell, which seem to me beautiful only as corpses and skeletons are so. In hell, it is evident, that it would not be advisable to be a dweller; but Orgagna's heaven, in which stiff figures sit in rows under orange-trees, seems to me so unbearably wearisome, that I would rather be anywhere else than there. The paths of the Campo Santo, are for the rest, full of figures without arms, heads, noses; and of monuments, more or less devastated by