d our souls with their unspoken
lessons?

Well, once upon a time (let us invent a fairy tale), a child was
brought to the Vatican: just such an one, only perhaps a trifle more
wayward, than those we met this morning, demurely led about, or
scampering through the galleries: its name signifies nothing, suffice it
that it was a child. Now, it so happened, that upon that day the statues
(who, as our forefathers of the middle ages knew) are merely stone
imprisoned demons, dethroned gods of antiquity, were bent upon getting
some small amount of amusement in their dreary lives: all the more
dreary since the great joyful hope of restoration in the hearts of men
which they had conceived when Winckelmann and Goethe came to them and
adored, had been slowly disappointed by seeing that what men cared
for was not them, but merely their own impertinent theories and
grandiloquent speeches. The Statue-demons were sick of the bitter
amusement of watching the follies of their pretended or deluded
worshippers. So they sorely wanted excitement, diversion of some sort;
and in their idleness, they capriciously determined to amuse themselves,
no longer with grown men, but with children. So, as a toy for the
moment, they singled out this particular child we are speaking of,
who was wandering wearily through the gallery, overpowered like its
companions by the sense of negativeness, of greyness, of silence, of
want of character and movement and story, and as it passed them, the
statue-demons looked at each other with their pupilless eyes, as much as
to say: "This is the one we shall take," and determined to cast a spell
upon it which would make it theirs. How they did is more than any of us
can tell: there was a little gurgling fountain in the garden outside,
where a broken-snouted dragon spirted a trickle of water through the
maiden-hair choking up the basin, and of this water the child did drink
a little in the palm of its hand, the rest running up its sleeve; there
was also an old noseless Vertumnus in a corner, on whose pedestal a
great tuft of wild grass had shot up, and round whose arms and neck an
ivy plant had cast its green trailing leaves; and one of these bitter
glossy leaves that child did certainly munch; but whether the charm was
in the water or the leaf, or in neither, and only a mysterious spell,
a sort of invisible winged seed of passion which they cast direct into
that little soul, no one may ever decide. Be it as it may, the ch