ees, with an upturned countenance of deep and imploring agony. In
vain! the shafts of Apollo fall thick, and she will soon be childless.
No wonder the strength of that woe depicted on her countenance should
change her into stone. One of her sons--a beautiful, boyish form,--is
lying on his back, just expiring, with the chill langour of death
creeping over his limbs. We seem to hear the quick whistling of the
arrows, and look involuntarily into the air to see the hovering figure
of the avenging god. In a chamber near is kept the head of a faun, made
by Michael Angelo, at the age of fourteen, in the garden of Lorenzo de
Medici, from a piece of marble given him by the workmen.

The portraits of the painters are more than usually interesting. Every
countenance is full of character. There is the pale, enthusiastic face
of Raphael, the stern vigor of Titian, the majesty and dignity of
Leonardo da Vinci, and the fresh beauty of Angelica Kauffmann. I liked
best the romantic head of Raphael Mengs. In one of the rooms there is a
portrait of Alfieri, with an autograph sonnet of his own on the back of
it. The house in which he lived and died, is on the north bank of the
Arno, near the Ponte Caraja, and his ashes rest in Santa Croce.

Italy still remains the home of art, and it is but just she should keep
these treasures, though the age that brought them forth has passed away.
They are her only support now; her people are dependent for their
subsistence on the glory of the past. The spirits of the old painters,
living still on their canvass, earn from year to year the bread of an
indigent and oppressed people. This ought to silence those utilitarians
at home, who oppose the cultivation of the fine arts, on the ground of
their being useless luxuries. Let them look to Italy, where a picture by
Raphael or Correggio is a rich legacy for a whole city. Nothing is
useless that gratifies that perception of beauty, which is at once the
most delicate and the most intense of our mental sensations, binding us
by an unconscious link nearer to nature and to Him, whose every thought
is born of Beauty, Truth and Love. I envy not the one who looks with a
cold and indifferent spirit on these immortal creations of the old
masters--these poems written in marble and on the canvass. They who
oppose every thing which can refine and spiritualize the nature of man,
by binding him down to the cares of the work-day world alone, cheat life
of half its glory.