hierogylphics

Updated: May 20, 2025

San Apollinare Nuovo, like most of its companions, is a magazine of early Christian odds and ends; fragments of yellow marble incrusted with quaint sculptured emblems of primitive dogma; great rough troughs, containing the bones of old bishops; episcopal chairs with the marble worn narrow by centuries of pressure from the solid episcopal person; slabs from the fronts of old pulpits, covered with carven hierogylphics of an almost Egyptian abstruseness lambs and stags and fishes and beasts of theological affinities even less apparent.

Henry James - Italian Hours