Page:Romance & Reality 3.pdf/116

114 small waves broke in scattered foam, something like the swelling of the unquiet human heart. The other side of the hill, whether from nature, or art of days so long past as to seem nature now, was much less steep, and, if more luxuriantly, was less thickly wooded, and with trees of larger size and more varied sorts. Through these wound a very tolerable road. The convent was a white building, with a chapel of great antiquity, and gardens of much beauty. The last notes of the anthem were dying into tremulous silence as they entered, and a long black train of dark and veiled figures were gliding through an opposite portal, whose massive doors closed heavily, almost hopelessly, on them. At the upper end, raised by a single step from the other pavement, stood a statue of the Virgin—one of those exquisite conceptions to which an artist has given the beauty of genius developed by the labour of a life—one of those forms, which the modeller may frame, and then die. Sculpture never seems to me like the representation of human life: its forms—pale, pure, and cold—have the shape, not the likeness, of our nature. I always personify a spirit as a statue. Paintings, however idealised as to