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THE ROMAN EMPERORS IN MARBLE. 1
1
3
time twenty-four years old—are a frenzy of fiendish de-
bauchery, of mad excesses that make trial of all a thor-
oughly depraved imagination conjures up, of an insatia-
ble craving for art conquests, and of wholesale murder,
when the instinct of self-preservation was stirred up by
real or fancied dangers. A break in the orgy came, when
Poppaea presented him with a daughter. But the fath-
er’s joy, feverish too, veered around to wild sorrow, when
the child died ; and sorrow threw him into new and if
possible more insane excesses.
A richly endowed people that enters upon the road
of culture, eager to learn of others, independent in its
conception, development and application of the knowl-
edge gained, glad in the feeling of its youthful strength,
surrounded by a kind of nature—and itself formed with a
fairness—that awakens a sense for the beauty of color and
form, will desire to give everything around it an expres-
sion of the health and harmony it feels in its own spirit-
ual and bodily being. So springs up art ; and with the
j,oy her very first simple manifestations awaken, couples
itself in the people, the feeling that what seems to it
highest of all, what it worships as divine, what it reveres
as morality and law, and what it loves as good and noble,
is, above all else, worthy to be looked upon, as far as may
be possible, in beautiful forms. The people desires to see
the true, as true and beautiful : its life of beauty is indis-
solubly knit together with its religious life and love of
country; and as thanks for adornment of that life of
faith and of patriotism, from them receives high inspira-
tions, dignity and ideality. No one of them is the others*
slave : they are sisters, of equal birth, and clasp each
other like the Graces. They increase in stature with the
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