beauty and the wonder of the world; the eye of light and the heart of
fire; "the angel nature in the angel name." And yet amid his fadeless
art he faded away; and at the deathless shrines which he left behind
the admirer of his genius is left to lament his early death.

Such thoughts receive a still more mournful hue from a touching
tomb--touching even though its taste be execrable--which records a
husband's sorrow on account of the death of his young wife--a princess
of both the distinguished houses of Chigi and Odescalchi--who passed
away at the age of twenty, in the saddest of all ways--in childbirth.
It goes to one's heart to think of the desolate home and the bereaved
husband left, as he says, "in solitude and grief." And though the
weeper has gone with the wept, and the sore wound which death
inflicted has been healed by his own hand nearly a hundred years ago,
we feel a wondrous sympathy with that old domestic tragedy. It is a
touch of nature that affects one more than all the blazonry and
sculpture around. In this weird church of Santa Maria del Popolo,
which seems more a mausoleum of the dead than a place of worship for
the living, the level rays of the afternoon sun come through the
richly-painted windows of the choir; and the warm glory rests first
upon a strange monument of the sixteenth century at the entrance,
where a ghastly human skeleton sculptured in yellow marble looks
through a grating, and then upon a medallion on a tomb, representing a
butterfly emerging from the chrysalis, illumining the inscription, "Ut
Phoenix multicabo dies." And this old expressive symbol speaks to us
of death as the Christian's true birth, in which the spirit bursts its
earthly shell, and soars on immortal wings to God. And the church
straightway to the inner eye becomes full of a transfiguration glory
which no darkness of the tomb can quench, and which makes all earthly
love immortal.