, and one fine old church, I have found nothing in the town
to please or interest me much. I have seen one or two old dog-holes of
houses, blackened and falling in with age, which seem as if they might
be some of the cinders of Charles the Bold's burnings hereabouts. We
left Brussels this morning, after spending a day and a half there. I was
much pleased with the gay and cheerful appearance of that small
imitation Paris, even to the degree of fancying that I should like to
live there, in spite of the supercilious sentence of vulgarity,
stupidity, and pretension which some of our friends, diplomatic
residents there, passed upon the inhabitants.... We went to call upon
the ----s, and, with something of a shock on my part, found one of the
ornaments of his sitting-room a large crucifix with the Saviour in his
death-agony--a horrible image, which I would banish, if I could, from
every artist's imagination; for the physical suffering is a revolting
spectacle which art should not portray, and the spiritual triumph is a
thing which the kindred soul of man may indeed conceive, but which art
cannot delineate, for it is God, and not to be translated into matter,
save indeed where it once was made manifest in that Face and Person
every imaginary representation of which is to me more or less
intolerable.

The face of Christ is never painted or sculptured without being
painfully offensive to me; yet I have seen looks--who has not?--that
were His, momentarily, on mortal faces; but they were looks that could
not have been copied, even there....

These steamship and railroad times will do away with that staple idea,
both in real and literary romances, of "never meeting again," "parting
forever," etc., etc.; and people will now meet over and over again, no
matter by what circumstances parted, or to what distance thrown from
each other; whence I draw the moral that our conduct in all the quarters
of the globe had better be as decent as possible, for there is no such
thing nowadays as losing sight of people or places--I mean, for any
convenient length of time, for purposes of forgetfulness. I forget
whether, when you left us in London, my father had come to the
determination of not accompanying but following us, which he intends
doing as soon as he feels well enough to travel.

Rubens's paintings have given us extreme delight.... I was much
interested by the lace-works at Brussels and Mechlin, and very painfully
so. It is beginning to