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Now they all, such as did not marry abroad, lie in the crypt of the church, in caskets of bronze and copper and marble, with draperies of black samite, more and more funereally vainglorious to the last. Their courtly coffins are ranged in a kind of hemicycle, with the little coffins of the children that died before they came to the knowledge of their greatness.
On the stage all was silence, but a murmur like the humming of bees in a hive rose from the vast hemicycle filled with spectators. All their faces, reddened by the reflection from the purple awning which waved above them, turned with attentive curiosity towards the large, silent stage, with its tomb and tents.
In the hemicycle above are the Virgin and Child under a Byzantine canopy with angels and founders on either side. On the central pier stands St. Marcel, Bishop of Paris, banning the horrible serpent that made his lair in a tomb: the retreating serpent's tail is seen on the pier. Both on this and on the north portal traces of painting still remain.
I didn't choose to walk any farther in the part of the garden they had chosen for a night promenade, and turned off abruptly. What? There, on the bench of the marble hemicycle in the north grove, sat a row of graybeards, old men in the costume of the first Revolution, a sort of serene and benignant Areopagus.
But above this sacred hemicycle there was another range of boxes; equally private boxes; as all the boxes of an Italian theatre are; and the key of one of these upper "loggie" had been secured by Ludovico, and presented to Signora Orsola and Paolina for the great evening.
They were as glad and gay as ever, and in our common polyglot they possessed us of the fact that they had just completed the eastern hemicycle of their Peninsular tour. They were latest from Malaga, and now they were going northward.
And why should not America, with the experience and added wisdom which three thousand years have slowly yielded to the old world, joined to the giant energy of her youth and freedom, re-bestow on the world the divine creations of art? Let Powers answer! But let us step on to the hemicycle of the Belvidere, and view some works greater than any we have yet seen, or even imagined.
Did you ever study De la Roche's incarnation of Mediaeval Art in his Hemicycle, that long saintly robe with its still and serious folds, that fair dreamy face, those upturned eyes, "the homes of silent prayer," the contemplative repose? It is truly an exquisite idealization; yet there is something wanting. I believe the piety of those days was rather a passion than a sentiment.
The open side of this hemicycle is forty-six feet along the front, and its curvature inwards is fifteen feet, so that those who are standing before the magistrates may not be in the way of the business men in the basilica. Round about, above the columns, are placed the architraves, consisting of three two-foot timbers fastened together.
Finally, however, another rush of invaders dislodged me, and I was swept with many others into the Chamber itself. All was uproar and confusion there. Very few deputies were present. The public galleries, the seats of the members, the hemicycle in front of the tribune, were crowded with National Guards. Some were standing on the stenographers' table and on the ushers' chairs below the tribune.
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