Blanc (Th. Bentzon)
first realized the dead poet's personality; she there caught
something of the afterglow of his presence: --
"The morning that I spent with Mrs. Turnbull was almost as interesting
as an interview with Sidney Lanier himself would have been,
so fully does his memory live in that most aesthetic interior,
where poetry and music are held in perpetual honor, and where domestic life
has all the beauty of a work of art. The hero of Mrs. Turnbull's novel,
`A Catholic Man', is none other than Sidney Lanier,
and that scrupulously faithful presentment of a `universal man'
was of the greatest assistance to me.
"The beautiful mansion on Park Avenue has almost the character of a temple,
where nothing profane or vulgar is allowed admission. Passing through
the reception rooms, I was introduced into a private parlor
out of which opened a music-room, from whose threshold I recognized the man
whom I had come to seek, -- the poet himself, as he was represented
in his latest years, by the German sculptor, Ephraim Keyser. . . .
By way of contrast, Mrs. Turnbull exhibits a glorified Lanier,
crowned with his ultimate immortality. He appears in a symbolic picture,
ordered by this American art patroness, from the Italian painter Gatti,
where are grouped all the great geniuses of the past, present, and future, --
the latter emerging vaguely from the mists of the distance,
and including a large number of women. This innumerable multitude
of the elite of all ages encircles a mountain which is dominated
by Jesus Christ; and from this figure of the Christ emanates the light
which Mrs.
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