remind me of the
girl's little deformed neighbor, if not portraits of him.--There is a
left arm again, though;--no,--that is from the "Fighting Gladiator," the
"Jeune Heros combattant" of the Louvre;--there is the broad ring of the
shield. From a cast, doubtless. [The separate casts of the "Gladiator's"
arm look immense; but in its place the limb looks light, almost
slender,--such is the perfection of that miraculous marble. I never
felt as if I touched the life of the old Greeks until I looked on that
statue.]--Here is something very odd, to be sure. An Eden of all the
humped and crooked creatures! What could have been in her head when she
worked out such a fantasy? She has contrived to give them all beauty
or dignity or melancholy grace. A Bactrian camel lying under a palm. A
dromedary flashing up the sands,--spray of the dry ocean sailed by the
"ship of the desert." A herd of buffaloes, uncouth, shaggy-maned, heavy
in the forehand, light in the hind-quarter. [The buffalo is the lion
of the ruminants.] And there is a Norman horse, with his huge, rough
collar, echoing, as it were, the natural form of the other beast. And
here are twisted serpents; and stately swans, with answering curves
in their bowed necks, as if they had snake's blood under their white
feathers; and grave, high-shouldered herons standing on one foot
like cripples, and looking at life round them with the cold stare of
monumental effigies.--A very odd page indeed! Not a creature in it
without a curve or a twist, and not one of them a mean figure to look
at. You can make your own comment; I am fanciful, you know. I believe
she is trying to idealize what we vulgarly call deformity, which she
strives to look at in the light of one of Nature's eccentric curves,
belonging to her system of beauty, as the hyperbola, and parabola belong
to the conic sections, though we cannot see them as symmetrical and
entire figures, like the circle and ellipse. At any rate, I cannot help
referring this paradise of twisted spines to some idea floating in
her head connected with her friend whom Nature has warped in the
moulding.--That is nothing to another transcendental fancy of mine. I
believe her soul thinks itself in his little crooked body at times,--if
it does not really get freed or half freed from her own. Did you ever
see a case of catalepsy? You know what I mean,--transient loss of sense,
will, and motion; body and limbs taking any position in which they are
put, a