Another
day, the last day I came, there were companies of the personally
conducted, following their leaders about and listening to the lectures
in several languages, which no more stirred the immense tranquillity
than they themselves qualified the spacious vacancy of the temple:
You
were vaguely sensible of the one and of the other like things heard and
seen in a drowse. It was a pleasant vagueness in which all angularities
of feeling were lost, and you were disposed to a tolerance of the things
that had hurt or offended you before. As a contemporary of the edifice,
throughout its growth, you could account for them more and more as of
their periods. Perhaps through your genial reconciliation there came,
however dimly, a suggestion of something unnatural and alien in your
presence there as a mere sightseer, or, at best, a connoisseur much or
little instructed. If you had been there, say, as a worshipper, would
you have been afflicted by the incongruities of the sculptures or by the
whole baroque keeping? Possibly this consideration made you go away much
modester than you came. "After all," you may have said, "it is not a
gallery; it is not a museum. It is a house of prayer," and you emerged,
let us hope, humbled, and in so far fitted for renewed joy in the
beauty, the glory of the sublime colonnades.
VII
CHANCES IN CHURCHES
If any one were to ask me which was the most beautiful church in Rome I
should temporize, and perhaps I should end by saying that there was
none.
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