o, from one room to another, the workman who
showed the marbles surprised and delighted us by asking if we would
like to see the sculptor, and took us up into the little room where
Gibson worked. He was engaged upon a bass-relief,--a visit of Psyche
to the Zephyrs, or something equally aerial and mythological,--and
received us very simply and naturally, and at once began with some
quaint talk about the subject in hand. When we mentioned our pleasure
in his colored marbles we touched the right spring, and he went on to
speak of his favorite theory with visible delight, making occasional
pauses to bestow a touch on the bass-relief, and coming back to his
theme with that self-corroborative "Yes!" of his, which Hawthorne
has immortalized. He was dressed with extraordinary slovenliness and
indifference to clothes, had no collar, I think, and evidently did
not know what he had on. Every thing about him bespoke the utmost
unconsciousness and democratic plainness of life, so that I could
readily believe a story I heard of him. Having dined the greater part
of his life in Roman restaurants where it is but wholesome to go over
your plate, glass, spoon, and knife and fork with your napkin before
using them, the great sculptor had acquired such habits of
neatness that at table in the most aristocratic house in England
he absent-mindedly went through all that ceremony of cleansing
and wiping. It is a story they tell in Rome, where every body is
anecdoted, and not always so good-naturedly.

IX.

One Sunday afternoon we went with some artistic friends to visit the
studio of the great German painter, Overbeck; and since I first read
Uhland I have known no pleasure so illogical as I felt in looking at
this painter's drawings. In the sensuous heart of objective Italy he
treats the themes of mediaeval Catholicism with the most subjective
feeling, and I thought I perceived in his work the enthusiasm which
led many Protestant German painters and poets of the romantic school
back into the twilight of the Romish faith, in the hope that they
might thus realize to themselves something of the earnestness which
animated the elder Christian artists. Overbeck's work is beautiful,
but it is unreal, and expresses the sentiment of no time; as the work
of the romantic German poets seems without relation to any world men
ever lived in.

Walking from the painter's house, two of us parted with the rest
on the steps of the Church of Santa Maria Maggi