chapel, a heated, battling, overpowering mass,
frantic with excitement to hear the famous
world-renowned Miserere strain of one Maestro
Allegri! The evening shadows have come upon
As I ascend the grand Scala Regia, under the
sloping all-embroidered and arabesqued arch that
ascends with me, it draws near to six o'clock.
Late indeed: but the magic wail is as yet
unsung.

From the grand Royal Stair into this grander
hall, all panelled round even higher than the
doorways, and thence, upwards, flowered over
and peopled with coloured figures, and life, and
action, but all toned down and blended with age.
Solemn ante-chamber to the Chapel Sixtine
close by, and, as I walk freely and see the
scattered groups clustered afar off and the tricolored
soldier leaning thoughtfully on his mediæval pike,
I seem to have stepped into one of the old
Belgian town-halls, washed in lightly by the brush
of Louis Haghe. Here the mind, too,
withdraws into its own ante-room, and gathers the
sense of something solemn impending. Figures
seem to flit by and cross softly, and whisper low
with bated breath, and there, by the tall doorway
where is the semicircular crowd gathered
looking one way, and where hangs the dark
shadowy folds of the curtain tossed now and again,
and where is semicircle, too, of helmed heads,
and plumes, and halberds, seems to be the
mystery. It is growing dark, and the painted figures
play out their action but duskily, and with this
ghostly company looking down, I draw near to
the silent cluster and the ring of halberds. As
I come close to a yellow Switzer's shoulder,
stern and immovable, some one passes out and
the great curtain is lifted, and there is before
me the whole Rembrandt scene, framed into
the tall oaken doorway. With the most curious
awe-striking contrast in the world, from the
quiet desertion and stealthily moving figures
of the hall, a glimpse into another world.
Impossible to think it could be so near. It almost
startles me, the great waste of indistinct figures
seated close, all stretching away in ranks and
ranks until lost and not to be pursued
further in the gathering shadows. To look across
this human waste, veiled and black-robed, and
see in flashes and snatches, as it were,
whenever the curtain folds are lifted, those other
awful figures gathered for the terrible Last
Judgment, starting out of the gloom and showing
their fleshy limbs up and down on the great
wall facing us at the other end; awful groupings
of Michael Angelo that live and look out mistily
from the cold blue background which seems like
atmosphere, with the melancholy yellow candles
flaring high up on the screen-top half way down,
and which seem like giant torches waved in the
air by unseen hands; with the funereal chanting,
most dismal and most melancholy, proceeding
from the side, a gallery where is a dim torch
too—to see this, is to see a picture that touches
on the sublime. Indescribable the hushed stillness
of that scene, with a strange weary sense as of
its being protracted through, many, many hours.

White specks glimmer indistinctly far away,
priests celebrants; but the great quaint flesh
and blood spectres struggling from the cold blue
atmosphere, seem to blend with the real flesh and
blood figures below. Glimpses, too, high in the
clouds overhead, of awful prophets, whose arms
extended seem to point downward menacingly.
The air seems peopled with these terrible ghosts.
At this hour is the triumph of the sublime master,
and happy, indeed, is he who has been denied
free entrance to the chapel interior—who has,
for the first time, come face to face with the
glories of Michael as the shadows of twilight
deepen! It is with such company, such attendant
associations of sacred pomp and dim
mystery, that this gigantic spirit would have you
visit his work. As I look again and again
through the oak-framed doorway, and see the
wondrous phantasmagoria passing beyond, and
rub my eyes and think it is a sort of dream,
with what gratitude do I give thanks to those
gentle muses who direct our footsteps—kind
Providences!—in things of Art, for that they
did not lead me hither in the staring daylight
when it was unpeopled; with, perhaps, an
explanatory guide, and, above all, with a Royal
Red Book in my hand!

Miserere still, some stages on. Stand fast,
halberdier, yellow-striped Swiss, without sense
or feeling, beyond duty; for the crowd is
thickening outside the hemicycle, pressing on you,
and ferociously expostulating. Gentlemen, spick
and span ripe for the ball-room, with folding
Gibus, crush upon the yellow-striped and are
repulsed; for snatches of sonorous music reach
to us round the edge of the perverse curtain
and turn us frantic. Gruff sergeant of Swiss
calls from within hemicycle, "All in good time!"
The most comical sergeant, wooden-faced, peering
through spectacles! "Keep them back!" and
we execrate him in our own tongue, for a grim
puritan wooden-faced sergeant in spectacles.

Ha! flashes out upon me of a sudden radiant
Spanish señora, who has been fluttering round the
stiff hemicycle, and cruelly denied entrance by
those striped stocks and stones. Radiant,
indeed, in her jetty hair, that shines and rolls and
eddies in its waving riches—in her dark eyes—in
her oval face, all lighted up, and beaming in her
dark veil. Spectacled sergeant has seen her; grim
military ogre, he will put her back. No! for a
miracle, he is smiling a wooden smile on her; is
beckoning; is opening a passage for her!

Gusts of sad threnodia are still borne out,
but not yet famous wail. Growing darker and
darker still. See! Now at last obstructive
curtain is drawn aside, and we look in unimpeded.
A season of stillness; sorrowful chanters are
at rest; one light, glimmering feeble, and casting
shadows in their faces, high in the gallery.
Indistinct white figures seem meeting at altar;
and solitary yellow candle, which unseen hand
holds aloft in air, flares solitary. Its brethren
have been extinguished one by one. The ghostly
company come out from the wall, and look
through the shadows. Hush! hush! Now at
last.