united power of two sympathetic, yet dissimilar, intelligences
is brought to bear upon a poem by reading it aloud, or upon a picture
or statue by viewing it in each other's company. Even if not a word
of criticism be uttered, the insight of either party is wonderfully
deepened, and the comprehension broadened; so that the inner mystery
of a work of genius, hidden from one, will often reveal itself to two.
Missing such help, Kenyon saw nothing at the Vatican which he had not
seen a thousand times before, and more perfectly than now.

In the chili of his disappointment, he suspected that it was a very
cold art to which he had devoted himself. He questioned, at that moment,
whether sculpture really ever softens and warms the material which it
handles; whether carved marble is anything but limestone, after all;
and whether the Apollo Belvedere itself possesses any merit above
its physical beauty, or is beyond criticism even in that generally
acknowledged excellence. In flitting glances, heretofore, he had seemed
to behold this statue, as something ethereal and godlike, but not now.

Nothing pleased him, unless it were the group of the Laocoon, which,
in its immortal agony, impressed Kenyon as a type of the long, fierce
struggle of man, involved in the knotted entanglements of Error and
Evil, those two snakes, which, if no divine help intervene, will be sure
to strangle him and his children in the end. What he most admired was
the strange calmness diffused through this bitter strife; so that it
resembled the rage of the sea made calm by its immensity,' or the tumult
of Niagara which ceases to be tumult because it lasts forever. Thus, in
the Laocoon, the horror of a moment grew to be the fate of interminable
ages. Kenyon looked upon the group as the one triumph of sculpture,
creating the repose, which is essential to it, in the very acme of
turbulent effort; but, in truth, it was his mood of unwonted despondency
that made him so sensitive to the terrible magnificence, as well as to
the sad moral, of this work. Hilda herself could not have helped him to
see it with nearly such intelligence.

A good deal more depressed than the nature of the disappointment
warranted, Kenyon went to his studio, and took in hand a great lump of
clay. He soon found, however, that his plastic cunning had departed from
him for the time. So he wandered forth again into the uneasy streets
of Rome, and walked up and down the Corso, where, at that per