A LEAF

FROM MY PARIS NOTE-BOOK.

BY H.T. TUCKERMAN.

Fresh from Italy, we enter the gallery of the Louvre with a feeling that
it is but a grand prolongation of the glorious array of pictured and
sculptured trophies, scattered in such memorable luxuriance, through that
chosen land of art; but the sensation is that of delightful surprise when
we have but recently explored the dim chambers of the National Gallery, or
obtained formal access to a private British collection. To cross the now
magnificent hall of Apollo, with its grand proportions flooded by a
cloudless sun, expands the mind and brightens the vision for their feast
of beauty. Here too, a magic improvement has been recently wrought, and
the architectural renovation lends new effect to the ancient treasures, so
admirably preserved and arranged. I stood long at one of the windows and
looked down upon the Seine; it was thence that the people were fired upon
at the massacre of St. Bartholomew; there rose, dark and fretted, the
antique tower of Notre Dame, here was the site of the Tour de Nesle, that
legend of crime wrought in stone; gracefully looked the bridges as they
spanned the swollen current of the river; cheerfully lay the sunshine on
quay and parapet; it was a scene where the glow of nature and the shadows
of history unite to lend a charm to the panorama of modern civilization.
And turning the gaze within, how calm and refreshing seemed the long and
high vistas of the gallery; how happy the artists at their easels;--girls
with their frugal dinners in a basket on the pavement, copying a Flemish
scene; youths drawing intently some head of an old master; veterans of the
palette reproducing the tints born under Venetian skies; and groups
standing in silent admiration before some exquisite gem or wonderful
conception. It is like an audience with the peers of art to range the
Louvre; in radiant state and majestic silence they receive their reverend
guests; first smiles down upon him the celestial meekness of Raphael's
holy women, then the rustic truth of Murillo's peasant mothers, and the
most costly, though, to our mind, not the most expressive, of all his
pictures--the late acquisition for which kings competed at Marshal Soult's
sale; now we are warmed by the rosy flush of Rubens--like a mellow sunset
beaming from the walls; and now startled at the life-like individuality of
Vandyke's portraits, as they gaze down with such placid dignity and keen
inte