tings of all times and schools, bronzes,
statues, sculptures, antique and modern terracottas, cabinets of gems,
an Etruscan museum, artists' portraits painted by themselves,
twenty-eight thousand original drawings, four thousand cameos and
ivories and eighty thousand medals. One resorts to it as to a library;
it is an abridgment and a specimen of everything....

We ascend the great marble staircase, pass the famous antique boar and
enter the long horseshoe corridor filled with busts and tapestried with
paintings. Visitors, about ten o'clock in the morning, are few; the mute
custodians remain in their corners; you seem to be really at home. It
all belongs to you, and what convenient possessions! Keepers and
majordomos are here to keep things in order, well dusted and intact; it
is not even necessary to give orders; matters go on of themselves
without jar or confusion, nobody giving himself the slightest concern;
it is an ideal world such as it ought to be. The light is excellent;
bright gleams from the windows fall on some distant white statues on the
rosy torso of a woman which comes out living from the shadowy obscurity.
Beyond, as far as the eye can see, marble gods and emperors extend away
in files up to the windows through which flickers the light ripple of
the Arno with the silvery swell on its crests and eddies.

You enter into the freedom and sweet repose of abstract life; the will
relaxes, the inner tumult subsides; one feels himself becoming a monk,
a modern monk. Here, as formerly in the cloisters, the tender inward
spirit, chafed by the necessities of action, insensibly revives in order
to commune with beings emancipated from life's obligations. It is so
sweet no longer to be! Not to be is so natural! And how peaceful the
realm of human forms withdrawn from human conflict! The pure thought
which follows them is so conscious that its illusion is transient; it
participates in their incorporeal serenity, and reverie, lingering in
turn over their voluptuousness and violence, brings back to it plenitude
without satiety.

On the left of the corridors open the cabinets of precious things--the
Niobe hall, that of portraits, that of modern bronzes, each with its
special group of treasures. You feel that you have a right to enter,
that great men are awaiting you. A selection is made among them; you
reenter the Tribune; five antique statues form a circle here--a slave
sharpening his knife; two interlocked wrestlers wh