No one to-day, probably, visits the Capitoline Museum for the Faun of
Praxiteles because it gave the romance its name; but at my latest sight
of it I remembered it with a thrill of the young piety which first drew
me to it, and involuntarily I looked again for the pointed, furry ears,
as I had done of old, to make sure that it was really the Marble Faun of
Hawthorne. I was now, however, for no merit of mine, in official and
scientific company with which it would have been idle to share my
satisfaction in the verification of the Faun's ears. Instead of boasting
it, I listened to very interesting talk of the deathless Dying
Gladiator, who is held to have been originally looked at more from below
than he has been seen in modern times, and who is presently to be lifted
to something like his antique level. He, in fact, requires this from the
spectator who would feel all his pathos, as we realized in sitting down
and looking a little upward at him.
In his room and in the succession of the rooms filled with his immortal
bronze and marble companions I was as if with ghosts of people I had
known in some anterior life.
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