over the tapers burning yellow on the carved marble
balustrades with the Rovere arms, with a luminous grey vagueness; the
blue background of the _Last Judgment_ grows into a kind of deep
hyacinthine evening sky, on which twist and writhe like fleshy snakes
the group of demons and damned, the naked Christ thundering with His
empty hand among them; the voices moving up and down, round and round
in endless unended cadences, become strange instruments (all sense of
register and vocal cords departing), unearthly harps and bugles and
double basses, rasping often and groaning like a broken-down organ,
above which warbles the hautboy quaver of the sopranos. And the huge
things on the ceiling, with their prodigious thighs and toes and arms
and jowls crouch and cower and scowl, and hang uneasily on arches, and
strain themselves wearily on brackets, dreary, magnificent, full of
inexplicable feelings all about nothing: the colossal prophetic
creature in green and white over the altar, on the keystone of the
vault, striking out his arms--to pull it all down or prop it all up?
The very creation of the world becoming the creation of chaos, the
Creator scudding away before Himself as He separates the light from
the darkness. Chaos, chaos, and all these things moving, writhing,
making fearful efforts, in a way living, all about nothing and in
nothing, much like those voices grating and quavering endlessly long.

ROME, _March_ 4, 1888.

III.

SECOND RETURN TO ROME.

I feel very much the grandeur of Rome; not in the sense of the heroic
or tragic; but grandeur in the sense of splendid rhetoric. The great
size of most things, the huge pilasters and columns of churches, the
huge stretches of palace, the profusion of water, the stature of the
people, their great beards and heads of hair, their lazy drawl--all
this tends to the grand, the emphatic. It is not a grandeur of effort
and far-fetchedness like that of Jesuit Spain, still less of
achievement and restrained force like that of Tuscany. It is a
splendid wide-mouthed rhetoric; with a meaning certainly, but with no
restriction of things to mere meaning.

The man who has understood Rome best, in this respect, is Piranesi.
His edifices, always immensely too big, his vegetation, extravagantly
too luxurious, are none too much to render Rome. And those pools of
blackness and immense lakes of ink.

ROME, _February_ 20, 1889.

IV.

ARA COELI.

Ended the morning charac