of heart.

All round both transepts of the church there is a series of chapels, into
most of which we went, and generally found an inscrutably dark picture
over the altar, and often a marble bust or two, or perhaps a mediaeval
statue of a saint or a modern monumental bas-relief in marble, as white
as new-fallen snow. A chapel of the Bonapartes is here, containing
memorials of two female members of the family. In several chapels,
moreover, there were some of those distressing frescos, by Giotto,
Cimabue, or their compeers, which, whenever I see them,--poor, faded
relics, looking as if the Devil had been rubbing and scrubbing them for
centuries, in spite against the saints,--my heart sinks and my stomach
sickens. There is no other despondency like this; it is a new shade of
human misery, akin to the physical disease that comes from dryrot in a
wall. These frescos are to a church what dreary, old remembrances are to
a mind; the drearier because they were once bright: Hope fading into
Disappointment, Joy into Grief, and festal splendor passing into funereal
duskiness, and saddening you all the more by the grim identity that you
find to exist between gay things and sorrowful ones. Only wait long
enough, and they turn out to be the very same.

All the time we were in the church some great religious ceremony had been
going forward; the organ playing and the white-robed priests bowing,
gesticulating, and making Latin prayers at the high altar, where at least
a hundred wax tapers were burning in constellations. Everybody knelt,
except ourselves, yet seemed not to be troubled by the echoes of our
passing footsteps, nor to require that we should pray along with them.
They consider us already lost irrevocably, no doubt, and therefore right
enough in taking no heed of their devotions; not but what we took so much
heed, however, as to give the smallest possible disturbance. By and by