Then there are the days of fierce, fastidious
longing--solemn church feasts of the intellect--when all vulgar effort
and all petty success is a weariness, and everything but the best--the
best of the best--disgusts. In these hours we are relentless aristocrats
of taste. We will not take Michael Angelo for granted, we will not
swallow Raphael whole!"
The gallery of the Uffizi is not only rich in its possessions, but
peculiarly fortunate in that fine architectural accident, as one may call
it, which unites it--with the breadth of river and city between them--to
those princely chambers of the Pitti Palace. The Louvre and the Vatican
hardly give you such a sense of sustained inclosure as those long
passages projected over street and stream to establish a sort of
inviolate transition between the two palaces of art. We passed along the
gallery in which those precious drawings by eminent hands hang chaste and
gray above the swirl and murmur of the yellow Arno, and reached the ducal
saloons of the Pitti. Ducal as they are, it must be confessed that they
are imperfect as show-rooms, and that, with their deep-set windows and
their massive mouldings, it is rather a broken light that reaches the
pictured walls.
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