The day of my furtive visit was sober
and already waning, with a breeze in which the fountains streamed
flaglike, and with a gentle sky on which the population of statues above
the colonnades defined themselves in leisure attitudes, so recognizable
all that I am sure if they had come down and taken me by the hand we
could have called one another by name without a moment's hesitation.
Every detail of a prospect which is without its peer on earth, but may
very possibly be matched in Paradise, had been so deeply stamped in my
remembrance that I smiled for pleasure in finding myself in an
environment far more familiar than any other I could think of at the
time. It was measurably the same within the church, but it was not quite
the same in the reserves I was obliged to make, the reefs I was obliged
to take in my rapture. The fact is, that unless you delight in a
hugeness whose bareness no ornamentation can, or does at least, conceal,
you do not find the interior of St. Peter's adequate to the exterior.
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