and a few moments during which I really seemed to see them; but it is in
vain to attempt giving the impression produced by masterpieces of art,
and most in vain when we see them best. They are a language in
themselves, and if they could be expressed as well any way except by
themselves, there would have been no need of expressing those particular
ideas and sentiments by sculpture. I saw the Apollo Belvedere as
something ethereal and godlike; only for a flitting moment, however, and
as if he had alighted from heaven, or shone suddenly out of the sunlight,
and then had withdrawn himself again. I felt the Laocoon very
powerfully, though very quietly; an immortal agony, with a strange
calmness diffused through it, so that it resembles the vast rage of the
sea, calm on account of its immensity; or the tumult of Niagara, which
does not seem to be tumult, because it keeps pouring on for ever and
ever. I have not had so good a day as this (among works of art) since we
came to Rome; and I impute it partly to the magnificence of the
arrangements of the Vatican,--its long vistas and beautiful courts, and
the aspect of immortality which marble statues acquire by being kept free
from dust. A very hungry boy, seeing in one of the cabinets a vast
porphyry vase, forty-four feet in circumference, wished that he had it
full of soup.

Yesterday, we went to the Pamfili Doria Palace, which, I believe, is the
most splendid in Rome. The entrance is from the Corso into a court,
surrounded by a colonnade, and having a space of luxuriant verdure and
ornamental shrubbery in the centre. The apartments containing pictures
and sculptures are fifteen in number, and run quite round the court in
the first piano,--all the rooms, halls, and galleries of beautiful
proportion, with vaulted roofs, some of which glow with frescos; and all
are colder and more comfortless than can possibly be imagined without
having been in them. The pictures, most of them, interested me very