E.]

They first passed into the great Cathedral in order to give a look at
that most beautiful of all Michael Angelo's sculptures--_Mary holding on
her knees her dead Son_. Barbara and Bettina had studied it on a former
visit to St. Peter's when Mr. Sumner was not with them. Now he asked
them to note the evident weight of the dead Christ,--with every muscle
relaxed,--a triumph of the sculptor's art; and, especially, the
impersonal face of the mother; a face that is simply the embodiment of
her feeling, and wholly apart from the ordinary human!

"This is a special characteristic of Michael Angelo's faces," he said,
"and denotes the high order of his thought. In it, he approached more
closely the conceptions of the ancient Greek masters than has any other
modern artist--and now we will go to the Sistine Chapel," he added,
after a little time.

They went out to the Vatican entrance, passed the almost historic Swiss
Guards, and climbed the stairs with quite the emotion that they were
about to visit some sacred shrine, so much had they read and so deeply
had they thought about the frescoes they were about to see.

For some time after they entered the Chapel Mr. Sumner said nothing. The
custodian, according to custom, provided them with mirrors; and each one
passed slowly along beneath the world-famous ceiling paintings, catching
the reflection of fragment after fragment, figure after figure. Soon the
mirrors were cast aside, and the opera-glasses Mr. Sumner had advised
them to bring were brought into use,--they were no longer content to
study simply a reflected image.

At last necks and eyes grew tired, and when Mr. Sumner saw this, he
asked all to sit for a time on one of the benches, in a corner apart
from others who were there.

"I know just how you feel," he said. "You are disappointed. The frescoes
are so far above our heads; their colors are dull; they are disfigured
by seams; there are so many subjects that you are confused and weary.
You are already striving to retain their interest and importance by
connecting them with the personality of their creator, and are
imagining Michael Angelo swung up there underneath the vault, above his
scaffoldings, laboring by day and by night during four years. You are
beginning in the wrong place to rightly comprehend the work.

"It is the magnitude of Michael Angelo's _conceptions_ that puts him
among the very first of painters; and it is the conception of these
frescoes t