Bare stone seats are
still left around Elizabeth's boudoir, upon which, when softly
cushioned with gold, she sat, and saw a fair prospect. The park and
chase extended twenty miles!
Nothing but music can ever equal or surpass architecture in variety of
utterance. Music is poetry to the ear, architecture to the eye, and
poetry is music and architecture to the soul, for it can reproduce
both. Music, however, seems to be freer from all shackles than any
other art; and I remember that in one of my essays for Margaret
Fuller, I made it out to my own satisfaction to be the apex of
expression. The old Glasgow verger of whom I wrote you had not got so
far as to see that it needed the "Kist of Whistles," as he called the
organ, to make his beloved Cathedral soar and glow with life and
praise to its utmost capacity. But I cannot say that it does not sing,
even without a sound, in its immortal curves, as Ruskin calls those
curves that return in no conceivable time or space. Cathedrals sing,
and they also pray, with pointed arches for folded hands. Julian
liked these ruins better than any he had seen, he said; and he climbed
up on the dismantled turret of Leicester's buildings, and settled
himself among the ivy like some rare bird with wonderful eyes. His
hair had grown very long, and clustered round his head in hyacinthine
fashion, and I think my lord would have been glad to call him his
princely boy. [Such things he never allowed himself to say.] All the
princeliness that lies in clustering curls Julian has lost to-day, for
a hair-dresser has cropped him like a Puritan.
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