like gondolas between walls
covered with admirable bas-reliefs, with charming inscriptions, with
immortal fancies, the outpourings and accumulations of ten generations
of wandering artists. Similarly one might have seen in the olden times
the scanty remains of some convent where, in the course of ages the
monks had translated their weariness of spirit into grinning figures,
with hooded heads, into beasts from the Apocalypse, clumsily sculptured
on the capitals of the little pilasters or around the stone chair of the
Abbot. But what a distance lies between this monkish nightmare and this
artistic revelation! At the very most the pretty little gallery which
joined across the Arno, the museum of the Pitti Palace, with that of the
Uffizi at Florence, could give our ancestors a faint idea of what we
see.

If the corridors of our abode possess this wealth and splendour, what
shall we say of the dwelling-places, or of the cities? They are filled
with heaps of artistic marvels, of frescoes, enamels, gold and silver
plate, bronzes and pictures, the acme and quintessence of musical
emotions, of philosophic conceptions, of poetic dreams, enough to baffle
all description, and weary all admiration. We have difficulty in
believing that the labyrinth of galleries, subterranean palaces and
marble catacombs, all named and numbered, whose manifold nomenclature
recalls all the geography and history of the past, have been excavated
in so few centuries. That is what perseverance can do! However
accustomed we may be to this extraordinary sight, it still at times
happens when wandering alone, during the hours of the siesta, in this
sort of infinite cathedral, with its irregular and endless architecture,
through this forest of lofty columns, massive or in close formation,
displaying in turn the most diversified and grandiose styles, Egyptian,
Greek, Byzantine, Arab, Gothic, and reminiscent of all the vanished and
venerated floras and faunas, when it is not above all profoundly
original ... it happens, I repeat, that panting, and beside ourselves
with ecstasy, we come to a standstill, like the traveller of yore when
he entered the twilight of a virgin forest, or of the pillared hall of
Karnak.

To those who on reading the ancient accounts of travels might perchance
have regretted the wanderings of caravans across the deserts or the
discoveries of new worlds, our universe can offer boundless excursions
under the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans fro