in this man there was something ethereal too, a divine

[Castleman <re...@fa...>]

Heir modern poetry and not the spots themselves. Without them, the spots
of earth would be unnoticed and unknown; buried, like Babylon and
Nineveh, in indistinct confusion, without poetry, as without existence;
but to whatever spot of earth these ruins were transported, if they were
capable of transportation, like the obelisk, and the sphinx, and
Memnon's head, there they would still exist in the perfection of their
beauty, and in the pride of their poetry. I opposed, and will ever
oppose, the robbery of ruins from Athens to instruct the English in
sculpture; but why did I do so? The ruins are as poetical in Piccadilly
as they were in the Parthenon; but the Parthenon and its rock are less
so without them. Such is the poetry of art. Mr. Bowles contends again
that the pyramids of Egypt are poetical because of "the association with
boundless deserts," and that a "pyramid of the same dimensions" would
not be sublime in "Lincoln's-Inn-Fields": not so poetical certainly; but
take away the "pyramids," and what is the "desert"? Take away Stonehenge
from Salisbury Plain, and it is nothing more than Hounslow Heath, or any
other uninclosed down. It appears to me that St. Peter's the Coliseum,
the Pantheon, the Palatine, the Apollo, the Laocoon, the Venus dei
Medici, the Hercules, the Dying Gladiator, the Moses of Michelangelo,
and all the higher works of Canova (I have already spoken of those of an