I frequently stand still a moment to survey, as it were, the heights I have already won. With much delight I look back to Venice, that grand creation that sprang out of the bosom of the sea, like Minerva out of the head of Jupiter. In Rome, the Rotunda, both by its exterior and interior, has moved me to offer a willing homage to its magnificence. In S. Peter's I learned to understand how art, no less than nature, annihilates the artificial measures and dimensions of man. And in the same way the Apollo Belvidere also has again drawn me out of reality. For as even the most correct engravings furnish no adequate idea of these buildings, so the case is the same with respect to the marble original of this statue, as compared with the plaister models of it, which, however, I formerly used to look upon as beautiful.
Here I am now living with a calmness and tranquillity to which I have for a long while been a stranger. My practice to see and take all things as they are, my fidelity in letting the eye be my light, my perfect renunciation of all pretension, have again come to my aid, and make me calmly, but most intensely, happy. Every day has its fresh remarkable object,--every day its new grand unequalled paintings, and a whole which a man may long think of, and dream of, but which with all his power of imagination he can never reach.
[Sidenote: Rome-The Grotto of Egeria, &c.]
Yesterday I was at the Pyramid of Cestius, and in the evening on the Palatine, on the top of which are the ruins of the palace of the Cæsars, which stand there like walls of rock. Of all this, however, no idea can be conveyed! In truth, there is nothing little here; although, indeed, occasionally something to find fault with,--something more or less absurd in taste, and yet even this partakes of the universal grandeur of all around.
When, however, I return to myself, as every one so readily does on all occasions, I discover within a feeling which does not infinitely delight me--one, indeed, which I may even express. Whoever here looks around with earnestness, and has eyes to see, must become in a measure solid--he cannot but apprehend an idea of solidity with a vividness which is nowhere else possible.