No cast gives you any idea worth having of the Apollo Belvidere. It is a god-like model of a man. The lightness and the elegance of the limbs; the free, fiery, confident energy of the attitude; the breathing, indignant nostril and lips; the whole statue's mingled and equal grace and power, are, with all its truth to nature, beyond any conception I had formed of manly beauty. It spoils one's eye for common men to look at it. It stands there like a descended angel, with a splendor of form and an air of power, that makes one feel what he should have been, and mortifies him for what he is. Most women whom I have met in Europe, adore the Apollo as far the finest statue in the world, and most _men_ say as much of the Medicean Venus. But, to my eye, the Venus, lovely as she is, compares with the Apollo as a mortal with an angel of light. The latter is incomparably the finest statue. If it were only for its face, it would transcend the other infinitely. The beauty of the Venus is only in the limbs and body. It is a faultless, and withal, modest representation of the flesh and blood beauty of a woman. The Apollo is all this, and has a _soul_. I have seen women that approached the Venus in form, and had finer faces--I never saw a man that was a shadow of the Apollo in either. It stands as it should, in a room by itself, and is thronged at all hours by female worshippers. They never tire of gazing at it; and I should believe, from the open-mouthed wonder of those whom I met at its pedestal, that the story of the girl who pined and died for love of it, was neither improbable nor singular. Raphael's "Transfiguration" is agreed to be the finest picture in the world. I had made up my mind to the same opinion from the engravings of it, but was painfully disappointed in the picture. I looked at it from every corner of the room, and asked the _custode_ three times if he was sure this was the original. The color offended my eye, blind as Raphael's name should make it, and I left the room with a sigh, and an unsettled faith in my own taste, that made me seriously unhappy. My complacency was restored a few hours after on hearing that the wonder was entirely in the drawing--the colors having quite changed with time. I bought the engraving immediately, which you have seen too often, of course, to need my commentary. The aerial lightness with which he has hung the figures of the Saviour and the apostles in the air, is a triumph of the pencil over the laws of nature, that seem to have required the power of the miracle itself.