ut
peculiarly fortunate in that fine architectural accident, as one may call
it, which unites it--with the breadth of river and city between them--to
those princely chambers of the Pitti Palace. The Louvre and the Vatican
hardly give you such a sense of sustained inclosure as those long
passages projected over street and stream to establish a sort of
inviolate transition between the two palaces of art. We passed along the
gallery in which those precious drawings by eminent hands hang chaste and
gray above the swirl and murmur of the yellow Arno, and reached the ducal
saloons of the Pitti. Ducal as they are, it must be confessed that they
are imperfect as show-rooms, and that, with their deep-set windows and
their massive mouldings, it is rather a broken light that reaches the
pictured walls. But here the masterpieces hang thick, and you seem to
see them in a luminous atmosphere of their own. And the great saloons,
with their superb dim ceilings, their outer wall in splendid shadow, and
the sombre opposite glow of mellow canvas and dusky gilding, make,
themselves, almost as fine a picture as the Titians and Raphaels they
imperfectly reveal. We lingered briefly before many a Raphael and
Titian; but I saw my friend was impatient, and I suffered him at last to
lead me directly to the goal of our journey--the most tenderly fair of
Raphael's virgins, the Madonna in the Chair. Of all the fine pictures of
the world, it seemed to me this is the one with which criticism has least
to do. None betrays less effort, less of the mechanism of success and of
the irrepressible discord between conception and result, which shows
dimly in so many consummate works. Graceful, human, near to our
sympathies as it is, it has nothing of manner, of method, nothing,
almost, of style; it blooms there in rounded softness, as instinct with
harmony as if it were an immediate exhalation of genius. The figure
melts away the spectator's mind into a sort of passionate tenderness
which he knows not whether he has given to heavenly purity or to earthly
charm. He is intoxicated with the fragrance of the tenderest blossom of
maternity that ever bloomed on earth.

"That's what I call a fine picture," said my companion, after we had
gazed a while in silence. "I have a right to say so, for I have copied
it so often and so carefully that I could repeat it now with my eyes
shut. Other works are of Raphael: this _is_ Raphael himself. Others you
can pra