Page:The marble faun; or, The romance of Monte Beni (IA marblefaunorroma02hawtrich).pdf/13

Rh be looked upon as altogether mythical. Still, it threw a romantic interest around the unquestionable antiquity of the Monte Beni family, and over that tract of their own vines and fig-trees, beneath the shade of which they had unquestionably dwelt for immemorial ages. And there they had laid the foundations of their tower, so long ago that one half of its height was said to be sunken under the surface and to hide subterranean chambers which once were cheerful with the olden sunshine.

One story, or myth, that had mixed itself up with their mouldy genealogy, interested the sculptor by its wild, and perhaps grotesque, yet not unfascinating peculiarity. He caught at it the more eagerly, as it afforded a shadowy and whimsical semblance of explanation for the likeness which he, with Miriam and Tilda, had seen or fancied, between Donatello and the Faun of Praxiteles.

The Monte Beni family, as this legend averred, drew their origin from the Pelasgic race, who peopled Italy in times that may be called pre-historic. It was the same noble breed of men, of Asiatic birth, that settled in Greece; the same happy and poetic kindred who dwelt in Arcadia, and—whether they ever lived such life or not enriched the world with dreams, at least, and fables, lovely, if unsubstantial, of a Golden Age. In those delicious tines, when deities and demigods appeared familiarly on earth, mingling with its inhabitants as friend with friend—when nymphs, satyrs, and the whole train of classic faith or fable, hardly took pains to hide themselves in the primeval woods—at that auspicious period the lineage of Monte Beni had its rise. Its progenitor was a being

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