; in love intensely, passionately, with Rome. And as a part of Rome
it loved, blindly, for no other reason, that desolate Vatican; to the
statues it returned, and in a way, grew up in their presence. And one
day the child looked at itself, and perceived that it was a child no
longer; knew all of a sudden, that in those drowsy years of childish
passion and day dreams, it had been learning something which others did
not know. For it heard one day a few pages of a symphony of Mozart's;
the first it had ever heard save much more modern music; and those bars
of symphony were intelligible words, conveyed to the child a secret. And
the secret was: "we are the brethren, the sounding ones of the statues:
and all we who are brethren, whether in stone, or sound, or colour, or
written word, shall to thee speak in such a way that thou recognise us,
and distinguish us from others; and thou shalt love and believe only in
us and those of our kin." Then the child went forth from the Vatican,
and went in among the pictures, and among the poems and the music, and
did indeed find that all those who were of the same kin as the statues
spoke to it intelligible words, and returned its love by making it
happy. This came of the statues having had the whim of giving to that
child the love potion which had made it love Rome.

All this is a fairy tale, a very meagre one indeed, quite inferior to
any told us by nurse or peasant woman; but a fairy tale nevertheless;
for, of course, we all know that statues cannot give love philters, nor
children fall in love with towns, nor symphonies talk about having
brothers in marble or colour. All this is rubbish of the same sort as
the dancing water, the singing apple, the dragon Fafner's blood which
made Sigurd understand the language of the birds, the enchanted lake
into which Charlemagne sat gazing out his life, because of the ring cast
into it; mere rubbish, and, consequently, not to be examined into or
reasoned about. But as the wise men of to-day tell us that in all our
nursery tales (Heaven forbid that anything so appalling be true) there
is a hidden, sensible meaning; perhaps, also, there may be one in this
absurd little story of the child in the Vatican, and that we may see.
And so, now, we must be serious and examine methodically into the
matter.

To grow up in the presence of the statues; to become acquainted
with antique art long before any other; to perceive the beauty
and enjoyableness of a stat