very greatly improved since those days, and, being always a man of
delicate mind, and earnestly desiring excellence for its own sake, he has
won himself the power of doing beautiful and elevated works. He is now
meditating a series of pictures from Shakespeare's "Tempest," the
sketches of one or two of which he showed us, likewise a copy of a small
Madonna, by Raphael, wrought with a minute faithfulness which it makes
one a better man to observe. . . . . Mr. Thompson is a true artist, and
whatever his pictures have of beauty comes from very far beneath the
surface; and this, I suppose, is one weighty reason why he has but
moderate success. I should like his pictures for the mere color, even if
they represented nothing. His studio is in the Via Sistina; and at a
little distance on the other side of the same street is William Story's,
where we likewise went, and found him at work on a sitting statue of
Cleopatra.

William Story looks quite as vivid, in a graver way, as when I saw him
last, a very young man. His perplexing variety of talents and
accomplishments--he being a poet, a prose writer, a lawyer, a painter, a
musician, and a sculptor--seems now to be concentrating itself into this
latter vocation, and I cannot see why he should not achieve something
very good. He has a beautiful statue, already finished, of Goethe's
Margaret, pulling a flower to pieces to discover whether Faust loves her;
a very type of virginity and simplicity. The statue of Cleopatra, now
only fourteen days advanced in the clay, is as wide a step from the
little maidenly Margaret as any artist could take; it is a grand subject,
and he is conceiving it with depth and power, and working it out with
adequate skill. He certainly is sensible of something deeper in his art
than merely to make beautiful nudities and baptize them by classic names.
By the by, he told me several queer stories of American visitors to his
studio: one of them, after long inspecting Cleopatra, into which he has