Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/162

Rh before those spiritual imaginings of men to whom the blue sky had seemed full of angels, and the watches of the night been stirred by the voice of God: before those old panels and old frescoes, often so simple, often so pathetic, always so sincere in faith and in work, she grew herself simpler and of more humility, and learned that art is a religion for whose right understanding one must needs become "even as a little child."

She had been in great art cities before; in the home of Tintoretto and the Veronese, in the asylum of the Madonna de San Sisto, in the stone wilderness of Ludwig where the Faun sleeps in exile, in mighty Rome itself; but she had not felt as she felt now. She had been full of appreciation of their art, but they had left her as they had found her, cold, vain, self-engrossed, entirely shut in a Holy of Holies of culture and of criticism; she had covered her Cavalcaselle with pencil notes, and had glanced from a predella or a pietà to the pages of her Ruskin with a serene smile of doubt.

But here and now Art ceased to be science,