【生活常识教科书】The_Marble_Faun_V.pdfVIP

更多好书请点击 THE MARBLE FAUN THE MARBLE FAUN (or The Romance of Monte Beni) Nathaniel Hawthorne Volume I 1 更多好书请点击 THE MARBLE FAUN CHAPTER I MIRIAM, HILDA, KENYON, DONATELLO Four individuals, in whose fortunes we should be glad to interest the reader, happened to be standing in one of the saloons of the sculpture- gallery in the Capitol at Rome. It was that room (the first, after ascending the staircase) in the centre of which reclines the noble and most pathetic figure of the Dying Gladiator, just sinking into his death-swoon. Around the walls stand the Antinous, the Amazon, the Lycian Apollo, the Juno; all famous productions of antique sculpture, and still shining in the undiminished majesty and beauty of their ideal life, although the marble that embodies them is yellow with time, and perhaps corroded by the damp earth in which they lay buried for centuries. Here, likewise, is seen a symbol (as apt at this moment as it was two thousand years ago) of the Human Soul, with its choice of Innocence or Evil close at hand, in the pretty figure of a child, clasping a dove to her bosom, but assaulted by a snake. From one of the windows of this saloon, we may see a flight of broad stone steps, descending alongside the antique and massive foundation of the Capitol, towards the battered triumphal arch of Septimius Severus, right below. Farther on, the eye skirts along the edge of the desolate Forum (where Roman washerwomen hang out their linen to the sun), passing over a shapeless confusion of modern edifices, piled ru