RAPHAEL SEES JULIE IN PARIS




PROLOGUE


The real name of the friend who wrote these pages was not Raphael. We
often called him so in sport, because in his boyhood he much resembled
a youthful portrait of Raphael, which may be seen in the Barberini
gallery at Rome, at the Pitti palace in Florence, and at the Museum of
the Louvre. We had given him the name, too, because the distinctive
feature of this youth's character was his lively sense of the beautiful
in Nature and Art,--a sense so keen, that his mind was, so to speak,
merely the shadowing forth of the ideal or material beauty scattered
through-out the works of God and man. This feeling was the result of
his exquisite and almost morbid sensibility,--morbid, at least, until
time had somewhat blunted it. We would sometimes, in allusion to those
who, from their ardent longings to revisit their country, are called
home-sick, say that he was heaven-sick, and he would smile, and say
that we were right.

This love of the beautiful made him unhappy; in another situation it
might have rendered him illustrious. Had he held a pencil he would have
painted the Virgin of Foligno; as a sculptor, he would have chiselled
the Psyche of Canova; had he known the language in which sounds are
written, he would have noted the aerial lament of the sea breeze
sighing among the fibres of Italian pines, or the breathing of a