Bathed in that brilliant
glow, the smooth porphyry colonnades reflected, chameleon like, ethereal
and varying hues; the white marble statues became suffused in a delicate
rose-colour, and the sober-tinted trees gleamed in the innermost of
their leafy depths as if steeped in the exhalations of a golden mist.
While, contrasting strangely with the wondrous radiance around them, the
huge bronze pine-tree in the middle of the Place, and the wide front of
the basilica, rose up in gloomy shadow, indefinite and exaggerated,
lowering like evil spirits over the joyous beauty of the rest of the
scene, and casting their great depths of shade into the midst of the
light whose dominion they despised. Beheld from a distance, this wild
combination of vivid brightness and solemn gloom; these buildings, at
one place darkened till they looked gigantic, at another lightened till
they appeared ethereal; these crowded groups, seeming one great moving
mass gleaming at this point in radiant light, obscured at that in thick
shadow, made up a whole so incongruous and yet so beautiful, so
grotesque and yet so sublime, that the scene looked, for the moment,
more like some inhabited meteor, half eclipsed by its propinquity to
earth, than a mortal and material prospect.
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