The ascent of the dome Gaspard recommended to defer to a dry and cloudless day, in order that they might behold the queen of the world, Rome, upon and from the proper throne; he therefore proposed very earnestly the visiting of the Pantheon, because he was eager to let this follow immediately after the impression of St. Peter's Church. They went thither. How simply and grandly the Hall opens upon one! Eight yellow columns sustain its brow, and majestically, as the head of the Homeric Jupiter, its temple arches itself! It is the Rotunda or Pantheon. "O the pygmies," cried Albano, "who would fain give us new temples! Raise the old ones higher out of the rubbish, and then you have built enough."[80] They stepped in; there reared itself around them a holy, simple, free world-structure with its heavenly arches soaring and striving upward, an odeum of the tones of the sphere-music, a world in the world! And overhead[81] the eye-socket of the light and of the sky gleamed down, and the distant rack of clouds seemed to touch the lofty arch over which it shot along! And round about them stood nothing but the temple-bearers, the columns! The temple of _all_ gods endured and concealed the diminutive altars of the later ones. Gaspard questioned Albano about his impressions. He said he preferred the larger church of St. Peter. The Knight approved, and said that "youth, like nations, always more easily found and better appreciated the sublime than the beautiful, and that the spirit of the young man ripened from strength to beauty, as his body ripens from beauty to strength; however, he himself preferred the Pantheon." "How could the moderns," said the Counsellor of Arts, Fraischdörfer, "build anything, except some little Bernini's towers?" "That is why," said the offended Provincial Architect, Dian, who despised the Counsellor of Arts, because he never made a good figure, except in the æsthetic hall of judgment as critic, never in the exhibition-hall as painter, "we moderns are, beyond contradiction, stronger in criticism, though in practice we are collectively and individually blockheads." Bouverot remarked, "The Corinthian columns might be higher." The Counsellor of Arts said, "After all, he knew nothing more like this fine hemisphere than a much smaller one, which he had found in Herculaneum, moulded in ashes--of the bosom of a fair fugitive." The Knight laughed, and Albano turned away in disgust, and went to the Princess.