picture one day, it is within my experience to look at it the next as
little moved as if it were a tavern-sign. It is pretty much the same
with statuary; the same, too, with those pictured windows of the Duomo,
which I described so rapturously a few days ago. I looked at them again
the next morning, and thought they would have been hardly worthy of my
eulogium, even had all the separate windows of the cathedral combined
their narrow lights into one grand, resplendent, many-colored arch at the
eastern end. It is a pity they are so narrow. England has many a great
chancel-window that, though dimmer in its hues, dusty, and perhaps made
up of heterogeneous fragments, eclipses these by its spacious breadth.

From the gallery, I went into the Boboli Gardens, which are contiguous to
the palace; but found them too sunny for enjoyment. They seem to consist
partly of a wilderness; but the portion into which I strayed was laid out
with straight walks, lined with high box-hedges, along which there was
only a narrow margin of shade. I saw an amphitheatre, with a wide sweep
of marble seat around it, enclosing a grassy space, where, doubtless, the
Medici may have witnessed splendid spectacles.


June 11th.--I paid another visit to the Uffizi gallery this morning, and
found that the Venus is one of the things the charm of which does not
diminish on better acquaintance. The world has not grown weary of her in
all these ages; and mortal man may look on her with new delight from
infancy to old age, and keep the memory of her, I should imagine, as one
of the treasures of spiritual existence hereafter. Surely, it makes me
more ready to believe in the high destinies of the human race, to think
that this beautiful form is but nature's plan for all womankind, and that
the nearer the actual woman approaches it, the more natural she is. I do
not, and cannot think of her as a senseless image, but as a being that