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When at length what used to be the castle town of Les Baux is reached, you find a naked mountain of yellow sandstone, worn away by nature into bastions and buttresses and coigns of vantage, sculptured by ancient art into palaces and chapels, battlements and dungeons. Now art and nature are confounded in one ruin.
The balconies on which the courtiers promenaded; the galleries, marvellously executed; the sculptured windows, whose embrasures are so deep as to form boudoirs for which indeed they served resemble at that great height the fantastic decorations which scene-painters give to a fairy palace at the opera.
The restored Assyrian architecture at Sydenham exhibits this style of art carried to greater perfection the persons and things represented, though still barbarously coloured, are carved out with more truth and in greater detail: and in the winged lions and bulls used for the angles of gateways, we may see a considerable advance towards a completely sculptured figure; which, nevertheless, is still coloured, and still forms part of the building.
This is certainly a handsome square of buildings, with its Grecian facades and pillars, and its sculptured bas-reliefs, and the group of statuary in the midst of the court. Besides the part of the edifice that rises above ground, there appear to be two subterranean stories below the surface.
No sculptured marble here, nor pompous lay, 'No storied urn nor animated bust; This simple stone directs pale Scotia's way To pour her sorrows o'er her poet's dust." On the other side of the stone is as follows: "By special grant of the managers to Robert Burns, who erected this stone, this burial place is to remain for ever sacred to the memory of Robert Fergusson." EDINBURGH, March 22nd, 1787.
It was a pretty little subject; the old man in his long black coat, with silvery hair, stooping over his anemones and tulips, tying up the white narcissus that a swirl of the mistral had broken; with the quaint sculptured capitals of the pillars above, and the deep shadows between the pillars before him; in the junctions of the old blocks above the arcade were wild gillyflowers blooming, and under the tiles were swallows busy over their mud nests.
But one solitary sentry, at the entrance of the copse, guarded the consecrated place; and its exceeding loneliness and quiet were a grateful contrast to the animated world of the surrounding camp. The monk entered the shrine, and fell down on his knees before an image of the Virgin, rudely sculptured, indeed, but richly decorated.
Here and there clumps of trees caress, as it were, the houses blackened by time; and the old stone hotels of the fifteenth century, with their long frieze of sculptured flowers, fruit and leaves, upon which the dove, when tired, rests itself, relieve the monotony of the slate roofs and brick fronts which surround them.
A large portion of the Doric marble frieze, however, still remains, on which are sculptured bas-reliefs of rams' heads, festooned with garlands of flowers.
Taking color, brutality, grotesqueness, and filth together, it seemed as if here were a mob of those malignant and ill-favored devils whom Dante has described and the art of his age has painted and sculptured.
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