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And who does not feel that the chief glory of Piranesi's book on Vases is that it gave Keats the suggestion for his 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'? Art, and art only, can make archaeology beautiful; and the theatric art can use it most directly and most vividly, for it can combine in one exquisite presentation the illusion of actual life with the wonder of the unreal world.
The sight and feeling of it fasten upon the mind and abide in the memory like a nightmare, like one of Piranesi's weirdest and most passion-haunted etchings for the Carceri.
De Quincey's quotation of Wordsworth is apposite in describing Piranesi's creations: "Battlements that on their restless fronts bore stars"; from sheer brutal masonry, gray, aged, and moss-encrusted, he invented a precise pattern and one both passionate and magical. You may find him mentioned in such company as Dürer, Rembrandt, and Whistler.
He brought forth all his treasures for the boy's instruction and the two spent many an afternoon poring over Piranesi's Roman etchings, Maffei's Verona Illustrata, and Count Benedetto's own elegant pencil-drawings of classical remains.
The sight and feeling of it fasten upon the mind and abide in the memory like a nightmare like one of Piranesi's weirdest and most passion-haunted etchings for the Carceri.
Having found, in the catalogue of a London book- seller, a set of Piranesi's great work on the ``Antiquities of Rome, a superb copy, the gift of a pope to a royal duke, I showed it to him, when he at once ordered it for our library at a cost of about a thousand dollars.
Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi's, Antiquities of Rome, Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist, called his Dreams, and which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever.
The irregular, black, ascending and descending staircases of notes strike the neophyte with terror. Like Piranesi's marvellous aerial architectural dreams, these dizzy acclivities and descents of Chopin exercise a charm, hypnotic, if you will, for eye as well as ear. Here is the new technique in all its nakedness, new in the sense of figure, design, pattern, web, new in a harmonic way.
These ladders, aspiring indefinitely into the air, like Piranesi's stairways, are called technically peak-ladders; and dear banished T.S.K., who always was puzzled to know why Mount Washington kept up such a pique against the sky, would have found his joke fit these ladders with great precision, so frequent the disappointment they create.
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