Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 | Page 9

bird in the colors
of her peasant dress, who cast coquettish glances toward high places,
not unacknowledged by patronizing nods in return, while mothers and
fathers looked on in triumph. These were the days for the upper classes:
the Church bore them all in her bosom as a tender nursing-mother, and
provided for all their little peccadilloes with even grandmotherly
indulgence, and in return the world was immensely deferential towards
the Church; and it was only now and then some rugged John Baptist, in

raiment of camel's hair, like Savonarola, who dared to speak an
indecorous word of God's truth in the ear of power, and Herod and
Herodias had ever at hand the good old recipe for quieting such
disturbances. John Baptist was beheaded in prison, and then all the
world and all the Scribes and Pharisees applauded; and only a few poor
disciples were found to take up the body and go and tell Jesus.
The whole piazza around the great Cathedral is at this moment full of
the dashing cavalcade of the ducal court, looking as brilliant in the
evening light as a field of poppy, corn-flower, and scarlet clover at
Sorrento; and there, amid the flutter and rush, the amours and intrigues,
the court scandal, the laughing, the gibing, the glitter, and dazzle,
stands that wonderful Cathedral, that silent witness, that strange, pure,
immaculate mountain of airy, unearthly loveliness,--the most striking
emblem of God's mingled vastness and sweetness that ever it was given
to human heart to devise or hands to execute. If there be among the
many mansions of our Father above, among the houses not made with
hands, aught purer and fairer, it must be the work of those grand spirits
who inspired and presided over the erection of this celestial miracle of
beauty. In the great, vain, wicked city, all alive with the lust of the flesh,
the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, it seemed to stand as much
apart and alone as if it were in the solemn desolation of the Campagna,
or in one of the wide deserts of Africa,--so little part or lot did it appear
to have in anything earthly, so little to belong to the struggling, bustling
crowd who beneath its white dazzling pinnacles seemed dwarfed into
crawling insects. They who could look up from the dizzy, frivolous life
below saw far, far above them, in the blue Italian air, thousands of
glorified saints standing on a thousand airy points of brilliant whiteness,
ever solemnly adoring. The marble which below was somewhat
touched and soiled with the dust of the street seemed gradually to refine
and brighten as it rose into the pure regions of the air, till at last in
those thousand distant pinnacles it had the ethereal translucence of
wintry frost-work, and now began to glow with the violet and rose hues
of evening, in solemn splendor.
The ducal cortege sweeps by; but we have mounted the dizzy, dark
staircase that leads to the roof, where, amid the bustling life of the city,
there is a promenade of still and wondrous solitude. One seems to have
ascended in those few moments far beyond the tumult and dust of

earthly things, to the silence, the clearness, the tranquillity of ethereal
regions. The noise of the rushing tides of life below rises only in a soft
and distant murmur; while around, in the wide, clear distance, is spread
a prospect which has not on earth its like or its equal. The beautiful
plains of Lombardy lie beneath like a map, and the northern
horizon-line is glittering with the entire sweep of the Alps, like a
solemn senate of archangels with diamond mail and glittering crowns.
Mont Blanc, Monte Rosa with his countenance of light, the Jungfrau
and all the weird brothers of the Oberland, rise one after another to the
delighted gaze, and the range of the Tyrol melts far off into the blue of
the sky. On another side, the Apennines, with their picturesque outlines
and cloud-spotted sides, complete the inclosure. All around, wherever
the eye turns, is the unbroken phalanx of mountains; and this temple,
with its thousand saintly statues standing in attitudes of ecstasy and
prayer, seems like a worthy altar and shrine for the beautiful plain
which the mountains inclose: it seems to give all Northern Italy to God.
The effect of the statues in this high, pure air, in this solemn, glorious
scenery, is peculiar. They seem a meet companionship for these exalted
regions. They seem to stand exultant on their spires, poised lightly as
ethereal creatures, the fit inhabitants of the pure blue sky. One feels that
they have done with earth; one can fancy them a band of white-robed
kings and priests forever ministering in that great temple of