s eager to let
this follow immediately after the impression of Saint Peter's church.
They went thither. How simply and grandly the hall opens! Eight
yellow columns sustain its brow, and majestically as the head of the
Homeric Jupiter its temple arches itself. It is the Rotunda or
Pantheon. "O the pigmies," cried Albano, "who would fain give us new
temples! Raise the old ones higher out of the rubbish, and then you
have built enough!" [7] They stepped in. There rose round about them a
holy, simple, free world-structure, with its heaven-arches soaring and
striving upward, an Odeum of the tones of the Sphere-music, a world in
the world! And overhead[8] the eye-socket of the light and of the sky
gleamed down, and the distant rack of clouds seemed to touch the lofty
arch over which it shot along! And round about them stood nothing but
the temple-bearers, the columns! The temple of _all_ gods endured and
concealed the diminutive altars of the later ones.

Gaspard questioned Albano about his impressions. He said he preferred
the larger church of Saint Peter. The knight approved, and said that
youth, like nations, always more easily found and better appreciated
the sublime than the beautiful, and that the spirit of the young man
ripened from strong to beautiful, as the body of the same ripens from
the beautiful into the strong; however, he himself preferred the
Pantheon. "How could the moderns," said the Counsellor of Arts,
Fraischdoerfer, "build anything, except some little Bernini-like
turrets?" "That is why," said the offended Provincial Architect, Dian
(who despised the Counsellor of Arts, because he never made a good
figure except in the esthetic hall of judgment as critic, never in the
exhibition-hall as painter), "we moderns are, without contradiction,
stronger in criticism; though in practice we are, collectively and
individually, blockheads." Bouverot remarked that the Corinthian
columns might be higher. The Counsellor of Arts said that after all he
knew nothing more like this fine hemisphere than a much smaller one,
which he had found in Herculaneum molded in ashes, of the bosom of a
fair fugitive. The knight laughed, and Albano turned away in disgust
and went to the Princess.

He asked her for her opinion about the two temples. "Sophocles here,
Shakespeare there; but I comprehend and appreciate Sophocles more
easily," she replied, and looked with new eyes into his new
countenance. For the supernatural illumination