the
enshrinement and the embodiment of the Spirit of God.]

[pn] {443} _His earthly palace_----.--[MS. M. erased.]

[525] [This stanza may be paraphrased, but not construed. Apparently,
the meaning is that as the eye becomes accustomed to the details and
proportions of the building, the sense of its vastness increases. Your
first impression was at fault, you had not begun to realize the almost
inconceivable vastness of the structure. You had begun to climb the
mountain, and the dazzling peak seemed to be close at your head, but as
you ascend, it recedes. "Thou movest," but the building expands; "thou
climbest," but the Alp increases in height. In both cases the eye has
been deceived by gigantic elegance, by the proportion of parts to the
whole.]

[po] And fair proportions which beguile the eyes.--[MS. M. erased.]

[pp]
_Painting and marble of so many dyes_--
_And glorious high altar where for ever burn_.--[MS. M. erased.]

[pq]
_Its Giant's limbs and by degrees_----
or, _The Giant eloquence and thus unroll_.--[MS. M. erased.]

[pr]
----_our narrow sense_
_Cannot keep pace with mind_----[MS. M. erased.]

[ps] {445} _What Earth nor Time--nor former Thought could frame_.--[MS.
M. erased.]

[pt] _Before your eye--and ye return not as ye came_.--[MS. M. erased.]

[pu] _In that which Genius did, what great Conceptions can_.--[MS. M.
erased.]

[526] [Pliny tells us (_Hist. Nat._, xxxvi. 5) that the Laocoon which
stood in the palace of Titus was the work of three sculptors, natives of
Rhodes; and it is now universally admitted that the statue which was
found (January 14, 1516) in the vineyard of Felice de' Freddi, not far
from the ruins of the palace, and is now in the Vatican, is the statue
which Pliny describes. M. Collignon, in his _Histoire de la Sculpture
Grecque_, gives reasons for assigning the date of the Laocoon to the
first years of the first century B.C. It follows that the work is a
century later than the frieze of the great altar of Pergamos, which
contains the figure of a young giant caught in the toils of Athena's
serpent--a theme which served as a model for later sculptors of the same
school. In 1817 the Laocoon was in the heyday of its fame, and was
regarded as the supreme achievement of ancient art. Since then it has
been decried and dethroned. M. Collignon protests against this excessive
depreciation, and makes himself the mouthpiece of a second and mo