Another cabinet—­this is the far-famed Antinous.  A countenance of perfect Grecian beauty, with a form such as we would imagine for one of Homer’s heroes.  His features are in repose, and there is something in their calm, settled expression, strikingly like life.

Now we look on a scene of the deepest physical agony.  Mark how every muscle of old Laocoon’s body is distended to the utmost in the mighty struggle!  What intensity of pain in the quivering, distorted, features!  Every nerve, which despair can call into action, is excited in one giant effort, and a scream of anguish seems just to have quivered on those marble lips.  The serpents have rolled their strangling coils around father and sons, but terror has taken away the strength of the latter, and they make but feeble resistance.  After looking with indifference on the many casts of this group, I was the more moved by the magnificent original.  It deserves all the admiration that has been heaped upon it.

I absolutely trembled on approaching the cabinet of the Apollo, I had built up in fancy a glorious ideal, drawn from all that bards have sung or artists have rhapsodized about its divine beauty.  I feared disappointment—­I dreaded to have my ideal displaced and my faith in the power of human genius overthrown by a form less than perfect.  However, with a feeling of desperate excitement, I entered and looked upon it.

Now what shall I say of it?  How make you comprehend its immortal beauty?  To what shall I liken its glorious perfection of form, or the fire that imbues the cold marble with the soul of a god?  Not with sculpture, for it stands alone and above all other works of art—­nor with men, for it has a majesty more than human.  I gazed on it, lost in wonder and joy—­joy that I could, at last, take into my mind a faultless ideal of godlike, exalted manhood.  The figure appears actually to possess a spirit, and I looked on it, not as on a piece of marble, but a being of loftier mould, and half expected to see him step forward when the arrow had reached its mark.  I would give worlds to feel one moment the sculptor’s mental triumph when his work was completed; that one exulting thrill must have repaid him for every ill he might have suffered on earth!  With what divine inspiration has he wrought its faultless lines!  There is a spirit in every limb which mere toil could not have given.  It must have been caught in those lofty moments.

    “When each conception was a heavenly guest—­a
    ray of immortality—­and stood
    star-like, around, until they gathered to a god?”

We ran through a series of halls, roofed with golden stars on a deep blue, midnight sky, and filled with porphyry vases, black marble gods, and mummies.  Some of the statues shone with the matchless polish they had received from a Theban artisan before Athens was founded, and are, apparently, as fresh and perfect as when looked upon by the vassals of Sesostris.  Notwithstanding their stiff, rough-hewn limbs, there were some figures of great beauty, and they gave me a much higher idea of Egyptian sculpture.  In an adjoining hall, containing colossal busts of the gods, is a vase forty-one feet in circumference, of one solid block of red porphyry.