while in waters too deep for intellectual security. But his abounding
knowledge and happy judgment told a touching story of long attentive
hours in this worshipful company; there was a reproach to my wasteful
saunterings in so devoted a culture of opportunity. "There are two
moods," I remember his saying, "in which we may walk through
galleries--the critical and the ideal. They seize us at their pleasure,
and we can never tell which is to take its turn. The critical mood,
oddly, is the genial one, the friendly, the condescending. It relishes
the pretty trivialities of art, its vulgar cleverness, its conscious
graces. It has a kindly greeting for anything which looks as if,
according to his light, the painter had enjoyed doing it--for the little
Dutch cabbages and kettles, for the taper fingers and breezy mantles of
late-coming Madonnas, for the little blue-hilled, pastoral, sceptical
Italian landscapes. Then there are the days of fierce, fastidious
longing--solemn church feasts of the intellect--when all vulgar effort
and all petty success is a weariness, and everything but the best--the
best of the best--disgusts. In these hours we are relentless aristocrats
of taste. We will not take Michael Angelo for granted, we will not
swallow Raphael whole!"

The gallery of the Uffizi is not only rich in its possessions, but
peculiarly fortunate in that fine architectural accident, as one may call
it, which unites it--with the breadth of river and city between them--to
those princely chambers of the Pitti Palace. The Louvre and the Vatican
hardly give you such a sense of sustained inclosure as those long
passages projected over street and stream to establish a sort of
inviolate transition between the two palaces of art. We passed along the
gallery in which those precious drawings by eminent hands hang chaste and
gray above the swirl and murmur of the yellow Arno, and reached the ducal
saloons of the Pitti. Ducal as they are, it must be confessed that they