One thing more, however—a Venus, by Lampi. It kept me a great while before it. She lies asleep on a rich couch, and, apparently in her dream, is pressing a rose to her bosom, while one delicate foot, carelessly thrown back, is half imbedded in a superb cushion supporting a crown and sceptre. It is a lie, by all experience. The moral is false, but the picture is delicious.
[4] Besides the three galleries of the Belvidere, Leichstenstein, and Esterhazy, which contain as many choice masters as Rome and Florence together, the guide-book refers the traveller to _sixty-four_ private galleries of oil paintings, well worth his attention, and to _twenty-five_ private collections of engravings and antiquities. We shall soon be obliged to go to Vienna, to study the arts, at this rate. They have only no sculpture.
Departure from Vienna—The Eil-Wagon—Motley quality of the passengers—Thunderstorm in the Mountains of Styria—Trieste—Short beds of the Germans—Grotto of Adelsburgh—Curious Ball-Room in the Cavern—Nautical preparations for a Dance on board the “United States” swept away by the Bora—Its successful termination.
I left Vienna at daylight in a diligence nearly as capacious as a steamboat—inaptly called the _eil-wagon_. A Friuli count, with a pair of cavalry moustaches, his wife, a pretty Viennese of eighteen, scarce married a year, two fashionable-looking young Russians, an Austrian midshipman, a fat Gratz lawyer, a trader from the Danube, and a young Bavarian student, going to seek his fortune in Egypt, were my companions. The social habits of continental travellers had given me thus much information by the end of the first post.
We drove on with German regularity, three days and three nights, eating four meals a-day (and very good ones), and improving hourly in our acquaintance. The Russians spoke all our languages. The Friulese and the Bavarian spoke everything but English, and the lady, the trader, and the Gratz avocat, were confined to their vernacular. It was a pretty idea of Babel when the conversation became general.
We were coursing the bank of a river, in one of the romantic passes of the mountains of Styria, with a dark thunder-storm gathering on the summit of a crag overhanging us. I was pointing out to one of my companions a noble ruin of a castle seated very loftily on the edge of one of the precipices, when a streak of the most vivid lightning shot straight upon the northern-most turret, and the moment after several large masses rolled slowly down the mountain-side. It was so like the scenery in a play, that I looked at my companion with half a doubt that it was some optical delusion. It reminded me of some of Martin’s engravings. The sublime is so well imitated in our day that one is less surprised than he would suppose when nature produces the reality.