Corinne interrupted the reverie of Oswald, and said to him, “You have seen Gothic churches in England and in Germany; you must have remarked that they have a much more gloomy effect than this church.  There was something mysterious in the Catholicism of the northern nations; ours speaks to the imagination by external objects.  Michael Angelo said on beholding the cupola of the Pantheon, ‘I will place it in the air;’ and, in effect, St Peter’s is a temple built upon a church.  There is some connection between the ancient religions and Christianity, in the effect which the interior of this edifice produces upon the imagination.  I often come and walk here to restore to my soul that serenity which it sometimes loses:  the sight of such a monument is like continual and sustained music, which waits to do you good when you approach; and certainly we must reckon among the claims of our nation to glory, the patience, the courage and the disinterestedness of the heads of the church, who have devoted one hundred and fifty years, so much money, and so much labour, to the completion of an edifice which they who built it could not expect to enjoy[10].  It is even a service rendered to the public morals to present a nation with a monument which is the emblem of so many noble and generous ideas.”  “Yes,” answered Oswald; “here the arts possess grandeur, and imagination and invention are full of genius; but how is the dignity of man himself protected here!  What institutions! what feebleness in the greater part of the governments of Italy! and, nevertheless, what subjugation in the mind!” “Other nations,” interrupted Corinne, “have borne the yoke the same as we, and have lacked the imagination to dream of another fate.

     ‘Servi siam si, ma servi ognor frementi.’

     ‘Yes! we are slaves, but slaves ever quivering with hope,’

says Alfieri, the most bold of our modern writers.  There is so much soul in our fine arts that perhaps one day our character will be equal to our genius.

“Behold,” continued Corinne, “those statues placed on the tombs, those pictures in mosaic—­patient and faithful copies of the masterpieces of our great artists.  I never examine St Peter’s in detail, because I do not wish to discover those multiplied beauties which disturb in some degree the impression of the whole.  But what a monument is that, where the masterpieces of the human mind appear superfluous ornaments!  This temple is like a world by itself; it affords an asylum against heat and cold; it has its own peculiar season—­a perpetual spring, which the external atmosphere can never change.  A subterraneous church is built beneath this temple;—­the popes, and several foreign potentates, are buried there:  Christina after her abdication—­the Stuarts since the overthrow of their dynasty.  Rome has long afforded an asylum to exiles from every part of the world.  Is not Rome herself dethroned?  Her aspect affords consolation to kings, fallen like herself.