I heard the Poet’s voice in the balcony, followed by the pushing back of heavy persiane, and then:

‘Lamia! Come as quickly as you can; I want to show you what you may never have a chance of seeing again.’

There was no reason why, if there was anything new or wonderful to behold, Lamia and the Poet should have a monopoly of the spectacle; so, arraying myself as rapidly as I could, I emerged onto the balcony just as Lamia, in incomplete but most fascinating attire, did the same.

‘Oh!’ she exclaimed. ‘What hills! What slopes! What villas! But where is Florence?’

‘Wait,’ said the Poet, ‘and you shall see. Like you, dear Lamia, she is very fair,’—how I wish I had the courage to address her in that fashion!—‘but, unlike you, she has not yet flowered out of the night.’

‘Neither have I, quite, I fear,’ she said, showing, when thuswise reminded, a quite unnecessary concern respecting her hastily-donned apparel.

‘She is veiled, absolutely veiled, as I have never seen her before, in a, shall I call it, peignoir of white mist, which conceals her utterly from sight. But look! she is beginning to disrobe her marble beauty.’

‘O, what is that, that surges through the mist?‘ ‘That is the noblest symbol of civic liberty in the world, the Tower of the Palazzo Vecchio.’

‘And that? And that?‘ ‘The topmost tier of Giotto’s Belfry, worthy, by its sublime simplicity, to serve for the type of all great Art; and, at its side in the rapidly-clearing ether, the cupola of the Duomo, that Michelangelo would not copy and could not better.‘Dome after dome, tower after tower, campanile after campanile, surged silently out of the mist; and, to use the Poet’s I hope not too familiar simile, the silvery folds of night sank downward to her feet, and Florence stood in naked loveliness before Lamia’s delighted gaze. Over the eastern hills came the bright vernal sun, every mountain slope broke into smiles and dimples, and in the last of its seaward valleys Arno glanced and gleamed with joy of the expanding dawn. Distance lends enchantment to the sound as well as to the view, and the clang and clash of innumerable belfries came modulated through the intervening air, wherefrom the last lingering trails of mist were gradually wizarded away.

Question and answer followed each other in uninterrupted succession. Yes, that was San Miniato Al Monte, with La Bella Villanella hard by; and that beyond was Santa Margherita, neighboured by the villa in which Guicciardini completed his History. And yes,—Lamia was quite right,—that was the Torre del Gallo, and away to the right and farther up the hills was the Medicean Poggio-a-Cajano, where Lorenzo wrote his poem on the Ambra. Over the matchless panorama of hill and valley her interrogatories wandered unceasingly, whilst we called on our recollection to supply the names she asked for.

Suddenly, other persiane were pushed back, and Veronica joined us.

‘What are you all doing?’

‘Do you remember,’ answered Lamia, ‘the wife of Cosimo, Pater PatriÆ, asking him, when advanced in years, why he so often sate with closed eyes, and his answering that he did so in order to accustom them to what they must soon always be doing? I am opening mine thus early, feeling that, in such a world as this, I shall never be able to close them again.’

‘It is perfect, absolutely perfect,’ said Lamia, ‘and no wonder Politian found it so.’

‘But did Politian really live here?’ I asked.

‘Let us be wise enough to think so,’ said the Poet, ‘and it was quite in keeping with Lorenzo’s magnificence, when that testy scholar, to whom he had committed the tuition of his sons, quarrelled with Donna Clarice because she thought she also should have something to say to their training, to provide him with such a sanctuary. Besides, in Italy, Tradition is not, as some one has said she is elsewhere, a toothless old crone with memory half gone, but the trustworthy depositary of unforgotten glories.‘

‘It is more than a tradition,’ said Veronica. ‘Only this morning I came across a passage from Politian’s correspondence, which would seem to confirm local legend. Here it is. He is writing to Lorenzo. “When you are incommoded by the heat of the season at Careggi, you will perchance bethink you of the shelter of my abode, nor deem it undeserving of your notice. Nestled in the sloping sides of the hill, we have here water in abundance, and, being constantly refreshed by moderate breezes, experience but little inconvenience from the fervour of the sun. As you approach the villa itself, it seems embosomed in a grove; but, when you reach it, you discover that it commands a full view of the city. Though the neighbourhood is not without its denizens, I can here enjoy the solitude so congenial to my disposition. But I can offer you the temptation of other allurements. Wandering beyond his own boundaries, Pico della Mirandola sometimes steals unexpectedly on my retirement, and draws me from my seclusion to share his supper. What that is, you well know; modest indeed, but neatly served, and made grateful by the charm of his converse. But be you my guest. The meal shall be as good, and the wine better.”‘

‘How very philosophic!’ said Lamia. ‘So much so, that the passage was probably written on the morrow of a certain fascinating young woman, whose name I cannot remember, but of whom Politian, I have read, was, notwithstanding his erudition, deeply enamoured, giving her hand to a rival scholar, though which of them, I need scarcely say, I have equally forgotten.’

‘The great Marullus, I think,’ said the Poet; ‘and your fascinating young woman was Alessandra, the accomplished daughter of Lorenzo’s Chancellor, Bartolomeo della Scala, whose house, still standing, you must remind us to show you in Florence.‘

Our first business was to make acquaintance with the immediate surroundings of the home provided for us by Veronica’s indefatigable foresight, operating through a protracted correspondence none of us had been deemed worthy to peruse. The rural architecture of Tuscany is of a noble simplicity; and, in the main portion of our villa, built in the course of the sixteenth century, there was no deviation from the familiar type. But, adjoining it westward, and seemingly of more ancient date, were an upper and a lower loggia of conventual aspect; the upper one having a sloping roof of rich red tiles supported by graceful pillars of pietra serena, and the lower one serving as an Italian equivalent of an English verandah, only more spacious and more tasteful, in which we could sun or shade ourselves according to the mood of the weather. Together, they formed an impenetrable barrier against the well-known keenness of the tramontana, while the main building provided ample shelter against possible inclemency from the east. To the west our view was over the final valley of the Arno, that spacious plain of fertile cultivation tenderly protected by hills of exquisite shape and moderate elevation, on whose bolder ridges stand historic towns of unmatched picturesqueness; while southward, over vineyards and olive-groves terraced down precipitously-sloping ground, we gazed on the domes and towers of the fair Tuscan capital. If one lives on the side of a hill, one cannot reasonably expect to have a very vast level expanse for the purposes of a garden. A quadrangular space of modest dimensions between the house and the low boundary wall, where the ground began to fall away, was all that had been dedicated to that pleasurable end; and this afforded Lamia an opportunity of observing that two such enthusiastic horticulturists as the Poet and myself would find but few worlds to conquer in so narrow a territory.

‘Forget,’ I ventured to plead, ‘what it is useless to remember. England is well enough, and so is Italy, but only on condition that you do not ask from the one what belongs to the other. I am not quite sure that the person who is intimately acquainted with both is ever quite satisfied with either, since it is part of our perverse human nature mentally to extol what we have not, to the depreciation of what we have.’

‘Is it to a woman you say that?’ observed Lamia, to my complete confusion. ‘Men preach Philosophy, women practise it; and I shall probably show myself quite content without your well-filled borders, while you inwardly, and perhaps sometimes outwardly, long for your rampant greenery and untidy efflorescence. These garofani—you see,’ she said, turning to the Poet, ‘I know the Italian for carnations,—in their tasteful pots along the loopholed wall are much more to my taste than all the straggling annuals and robust perpetuals in the world.’

‘I can see,’ he said, kindly coming to my rescue, ‘you have found your proper home at last. I thought it would be so; and we can only congratulate ourselves on the result. But now let us explore farther afield, and we shall probably find that, if we will only use the word garden in a liberal sense, and indeed in that in which it is used in the corner of England where we have our home, there is more of it than we have just rashly assumed.’

Thereupon, we passed through a cool, spacious cortile, cloistered on two of its sides, but for the rest open to the sky, and whose only occupants were a disused fountain and a tall glistening orange-tree covered with golden fruit, of course of the hardy bitter sort; thence under an archway festooned with wistaria not yet in flower, and out into the podere, which I must needs call by that name, since there is no English equivalent for it, and which is nowhere to be seen in such perfection as in Tuscany.

‘Indeed, indeed you are right,’ exclaimed Lamia; ‘right as when you once said that, were it always Spring, one would never garden, even in England. O this young green corn, with its purple anemones, its crimson tulips, its pale almond and intensely bright peach blossom, its fantastically growing fig-trees with their budding tips, its burgeoning vines and spectral olive-trees, all dwelling together on the fair hillside that seems to be smiling self-complacently at its own loveliness! Look at that bank of irises, not yet broken from their sheath! But when they have, what a sight they will be!’

It is always delightful to have one’s feelings expressed by some one else in language of enthusiasm one might oneself be afraid to employ; and we accompanied Lamia, as a sort of chorus, echoing all she said, and only too well pleased to follow in her footsteps, as she wandered on and on through a world of beauty wholly new to her.

‘And these lovely grassy paths,’ she said, ‘that lead everywhere and nowhere, tempting one to travel on in search of something unknown, but with ever, on either side, more sprouting wheat, more pendent vines, more crookedly-branching fig-stems, more tulips, more windflowers, more mountains, more glimpses of towers and belfries in the glittering distance. In England everything seems to crouch. Here everything seems to soar.’

Lured onward by Lamia’s enjoyment, and mounting by such easy and gradual slopes that we hardly noticed we were ascending, we suddenly came to a grassy plateau almost encircled by secular cypresses that are the distinctive glory of Tuscany; and here we might have been tempted to halt, had it not been that yet beyond it were rugged paths that zigzagged among tall, dense bushes of white heath and yellow broom, both now in full flower; while on shapeless boulders and protruding rocks were the stars of the white, the yellow, and the rose-coloured cistus. Here and there we came on sheets of the single pink anemone; elsewhere, in the more sheltered nooks, were the Apennine wind-flower which, with due care and choice of position, perhaps you remember, we have persuaded to flourish in the garden that we love.

‘As Veronica has told us that we are to lead a life of strict simplicity,’ said Lamia, ‘we had better do something to make it graceful; and, if you two will only cut some branches of heath and broom, I will be equally energetic among the anemones.’

We were descending homeward with our lovely spoil, when we heard a creaking sound well known to me; and, in another moment, we overtook the slowly-rolling wheels of a wooden wain—of wood, not only in its low, long body, but of wood throughout, with wooden wheels, wooden pole, and wooden yoke—drawn by a couple of cream-coloured steers, and bearing a fragrant load of newly-cut rye-grass. Though at no little inconvenience and delay, on the incline along which it was moving, the peasants who accompanied it at once cried a halt, that they might show their respect to and make the acquaintance of the new-comers. Of the manifold charms of Tuscany, perhaps there is none so great or so enduring as the charm of manner peculiar to its rural population. Frank without being free, deferential but never servile, not without a fine reserve yet with never a touch of shyness, withholding not a certain tribute to social superiority, while tacitly intimating the fundamental equality that appertains to human brotherhood, the demeanour and speech of Tuscan contadini keep intercourse perpetually fresh, and impart to conversation on the tritest and most familiar themes perennial liveliness and interest. Their salutations, frequent though these be, for they would never think of passing you without one, are divested of conventionality by their manifest sincerity. They can never see you, never speak to you, too often; and, whenever they speak, they smile. For thousands of years, morning has risen upon the world, but without any diminution in its freshness; and it is the same with their Buon giorno, signore! their Felice sera, sua signoria! their Felicissima notte, e buon riposo! their A rivederla! and all their ancient consecrated phrases for conveying their sense of the strong link that binds human creatures to each other. Every time they say these things, they mean them; nor do they ever tire of the iterated and reiterated courtesies of life. The undeferential nod of Northern manners, the mumbled recognition, the slipshod salutation, would seem shocking to them, as lacking in human piety. On this occasion, no doubt, natural curiosity blended with native good-breeding to make them halt in their labours; for they were, I have no doubt, as eager to make our acquaintance as we were to make theirs. Yet of visible curiosity there was not a trace, as they lifted their hats from their beaded foreheads and remained bareheaded till we begged them to cover themselves. What they conveyed was a fervour of welcome akin to the glow of an Italian sun, a welcome that warmed us through and through, and made us feel that, at that instant, we were forming friendships that, save for some fault of ours, would last through life. Were we all in good health? Had we had a fatiguing journey? Were we comfortable and happy in the villa? They hoped we were going to stay a long time. Could they do anything for us? Did we love Italy? Had we been there before? O, but it was evident we had; for we talked their language like one of themselves (somewhat of an exaggeration, save in the case of Veronica). Yes, the season was fairly forward, and there was good promise for everything, given what was now wanted, plenty of sunshine. Commonplaces, you perhaps will say. Indeed, yes. But which of us in this world is so surprisingly original? The real originality, in some countries I could mention, would be amiability, unfailing courtesy in the ever-recurring trifles of life, a wish to please and to be pleased, and a perpetual freshening of existence by treating nothing in it as a matter of course, or as undeserving of recognition and thankfulness. Even the most original of us are original only sometimes; and, if we are to consort with each other at all, we must needs indulge in a good deal of repetition and commonplace. But freshness of manner can make repetition sound absolutely new, and kindliness of disposition invest the veriest commonplace with an air that everybody shall take for uncommon.

It was with difficulty we led Lamia away from her new acquaintances, not the least attractive of those being the sleek, smooth-coated, soft-eyed oxen that play so large a part in the picturesqueness as in the rural life of Tuscany, and that seemed to appreciate the tender stroking of her hand and the equally soft caress of her voice.

‘I never felt such a bumpkin before,’ she said, ‘as in the presence of those gracious peasants. What barbarians they must think us!’

‘If they thought that of you, Lamia,’ I said, more struck by the exaggeration than by the humility of her remark, ‘they certainly contrived to conceal their impression. Still, speaking generally, rural Tuscany is a school of manners.’

The noble simplicity referred to as the distinguishing mark of villa architecture in Tuscany, is as dominant in the interior as on the exterior of its buildings; ample space being their chief feature and adornment. Unless they have been invaded by modern hands, they depend for effect on bold outlines rather than on decorative detail; and they are furnished in harmony with the same severe taste. When Veronica admonished us that we were to lead a life of strict simplicity, she referred to this circumstance among others.

‘I hope,’ she said, ‘you have left your sybaritic tastes at home. You will find many shapely but no comfortable chairs, no superfluity of cushions, nowhere a footstool, and, if you choose to lie on what looks like a sofa, you will soon find you are not reposing on rose-leaves. You must not come to me and complain that there is not a bell in your room, or, if there is, that it apparently has no communication with the outer world. If Lamia wishes to make a mess indoors with her flowers and branches of blossom, she shall not be denied; but you must not look for those more permanent graces of life to which you are all so attached.’

‘Don’t mind me,‘ said Lamia. ‘I am quite prepared to empty my own bath, brush my own skirts, answer the bell instead of ringing it, and live on fagioli and dried funghi. Indeed, it was chiefly to indulge in those unusual luxuries that I came to Italy.’

Considering who it is that has created, cherished, and fostered in us those sybaritic tastes, and that attachment to the graces and elegancies of life of which Veronica spoke, and with which she told us we were now to dispense, we may be pardoned, I think, if, at the first opportunity, we indulged in some private humour at her expense. If we are demoralised by domestic luxury, who is it but Veronica that has corrupted us? I protest that most men, in the matter of material comfort, are absolute Spartans, and, as for the Poet, his native austerity was once not to be surpassed, and he still indulges from time to time in his ideal, at any rate in conversation. But he too has, for the most part, succumbed to Veronica’s unequalled capacity for making life at once graceful and commodious; and I am not sure that now he would not, if at home, feel almost wronged if, should he happen to want a paper-cutter, he had to rise from his chair in order to go in search of one.

‘Just you wait!’ said Lamia, ‘and see what becomes of the simple life to which we are to dedicate ourselves. The first time Veronica goes to Florence, she will return, I will engage to say, laden with manifold conveniences of existence, and by degrees she will introduce a world of things into this splendid vacuum; and if, some fine morning, you meet a plumber or bell-hanger on the stairs, you need not regard him as an interloper. Nor would I mind wagering my next quarter’s dress-money that, before long, you will see me sitting in the easiest of easy-chairs, and gracefully reposing on the softest of ottomans.‘

‘I doubt it,’ said the Poet, ‘for Veronica has a fine sense of the fitness of things, and her tastes are sufficiently flexible for her to distinguish between Northern and Southern needs, Northern and Southern traditions. When Francesco Cibo, the nephew of Innocent VIII., married Lorenzo’s daughter, and came to Florence with a large and splendid retinue, he was entertained during the period of the nuptials with the utmost magnificence. But, at the end of that time, he observed that all the silver vessels and ornaments, of which there had been such a profusion, disappeared from the table, and were replaced by others of brass; and, moreover, that every meal was now served with the utmost plainness and frugality. Anxious lest his Roman attendants should carry back to the Eternal City the impression that he had contracted a union with either a very poor or a very parsimonious family, he sought to discover how they were faring, and found they were still being entertained in the most sumptuous manner. The enigma was explained when Lorenzo said to him, “You are now one of ourselves, and as one of ourselves I treat you. My grandsire Cosimo used to say to his sons, ‘Remember you are only citizens of Florence, and must reserve what splendours you can command for the glorification of the City.’ As his descendant, I obey his injunction.”‘

‘Hark!’ I said. ‘Already there are sounds of modern civilisation. The grass-plot is being mown.’

Lamia and the Poet listened, though I think the latter at once guessed my meaning.

‘What is it?’ said Lamia. ‘A mowing-machine? I cannot hear it. I hear only the bleating of sheep.’

We passed afresh into the garden, and there was a flock of ewes and lambs nibbling the sweet short clover, attended by a picturesque shepherd girl, who carefully kept them off the shrubs, but went on industriously knitting all the while.

‘Is not that a simple enough mowing-machine for you?’ I asked. ‘It attains to even Veronica’s ideal of primitive expedients.‘

‘It is as simple and primitive,’ said Lamia, ‘as much of the garden itself. What a comfort it is to find oneself in a country where’—I imagine this was intended as a shaft against myself—‘there does not rage a fidgety mania for perfection. Flowers here are reduced to their proper subordination in the universe.’

Whether Lamia was right or wrong in this conclusion, it must be allowed that, as a race, Italians have not that tender attachment to flowers which is universal among ourselves, and that being, contrary to general belief, far less sentimental and more practical than we are, they do not care to devote much attention to the growing of anything that cannot be taken to market and turned into quattrini, or ready cash. Hence, they will willingly grow carnations, freesias, arum-lilies, lilies of the valley, ranunculuses, and such like flowers that find a quick sale on the ledges of the Palazzo Strozzi, or under the shadow of the Municipio in the Piazza della TrinitÀ. But even these are so reared that the purchaser alone gets any delectation out of them, and the spot where they are produced is but little more of a garden in consequence of their temporary presence. The difficulty is to induce an Italian gardener to believe that you care for flowers for their own sake, that you regard the sale of them as a sort of desecration, that you feel they ought to be love-gifts, tokens of present or mementoes of absent affection, and, in any case, cherished companions of one’s private thoughts, one’s habitual pursuits, and one’s transitory emotions. He cannot understand that you want to consort with them, to tend them in sickness and health, to cultivate them for better or for worse, to let them twine and garland themselves about your inner and your outer life, to make them, in fact, flesh of your flesh, and spirit of your spirit, till death do you part, when, with a sweet form of suttee, they will come and immolate themselves upon your grave.

This conflict of ideals between the Poet and myself on the one side, and Ippolito, the gardener, on the other,—for the humblest folk in Tuscany have classical names, which they imagine to be Christian, and indeed frequently are so, thanks to some primitive martyr in the Church Calendar,—began at once, and never wholly ceased. We put our veto on the sale in Florence of flower or leaf grown on the premises; and as Veronica, with all her marvellous foresight, had not extended our contract to these, we had to arrange with him what was to be paid by us for what would otherwise have been profitable produce. Ippolito’s calculations were of the most elaborate character; but their complexity arose solely from his scrupulous desire to do justice as between man and man. Personally, he had no money interest in the matter; for, but for what he regarded as our unaccountable tastes, he would have carried all the saleable flowers twice a week to that charming little market-place which every visitor to the fair city knows so well, made the best bargain he could with the purchasing public, and credited his padrone with the amount received. Selling the flowers, he could know, to a centesimo, what they were worth. Not selling them, in deference to these odd forestieri, and therefore having to surmise what they would probably have fetched could they have been sold, and anxious neither to defraud his master nor to rob us, he lived, during our sojourn, a life of continual arithmetical anxiety. In vain were the Poet’s magnificent endeavours to make him understand that we were not, as modern language has it, so mighty particular as to what we paid for rescuing the flowers from what he regarded as an ignoble doom. We could excite no sentimental emotion on the subject in Ippolito. To him it was simply a matter of addition in decimals, the sum total of which should represent the practical results of abstract justice. It must not be supposed, however, that this quite satisfied him, or entirely quieted his conscience. To the last he let us perceive that he considered our arbitrary conduct to have a certain moral obliquity about it, since it caused and consecrated so much absolute waste; waste of time, waste of material, waste of money. Once, when we were not present, he appealed to Veronica, and asked if we were really in earnest in forbidding him to sell any portion of the flowers. The violets flowered by tens of thousands, the carnations were rotting on their stalks, and it was not possible more freesias could be wanted for indoors; and, with his Ma, Signora mia, and Senta, Sua Signoria, he did his best to convert her. But she told him we were inexorable; and, though she fully shared our sentiments on the subject, she laughed at us for a couple of zucconi, or dunderheads, for allowing ourselves to pay twice what the flowers were worth: a form of judgment which, as we have seen, was not quite equitable, but which nevertheless represented, with tolerable accuracy, the low estimate she entertained of either the Poet’s or my capacity for a bargain.

Once Ippolito was thoroughly convinced of our obduracy concerning his mercenary traditions, he showed an amiable readiness to please us, by bringing pot after pot of well-grown plants from frame and shelf and sheltering nook, and placing them where we would, and mostly round the noble fountain that flashed quietly but unceasingly in the centre of the garden enclosure; though he well knew that, even in the genial weather with which we were being favoured, the length of their days would thereby be somewhat curtailed; white arum-lilies, freesias, lilies of the valley, and early carnations, thus making a most lively show.

‘Do not suppose, though,’ I said to Lamia, ‘that Italy has not its true garden season, even in the English sense; and I trust you will, in due course, be able to judge of it for yourself. But it is brief in its marvellous beauty. Like the people themselves of this lovely land, the year ages soon, when compared with the lagging Spring, the lingering Summer, and the slowly-ripening Autumn of Northern climes. But when the roses come they will come in battalions, the wistaria will run riot over wall and pergola, the SpirÆa Van Houtte will whitely decorate itself with a lavishness unknown to chillier latitudes, and Madonna lilies will astound you by their height, and irises by their profusion. For a month, in a favourable season for six weeks, one will be embowered in bloom; then suddenly to find, if one gardens in English fashion, you have no garden at all.’

‘A short life and a merry one,’ said Lamia: ‘an ideal existence.’

‘But do not let us forget,’ I observed, ‘that when this brief exuberant blending of Spring and Summer has passed away from the garden, the purple and opal bunches of the festooned and trellised vine come timely to take its place.’

‘Nor,’ added the Poet, ‘should we omit that bewitching preliminary to the profuse period you speak of, when, as now, in whichever direction you look or ramble in that astonishing valley, almond and peach, plum-blossom, pear-blossom, and apple-bloom, fleck with their rich rival tints, from purest white to rosiest pink, the silvery spray of the ubiquitous olives.’

‘Silvery till ruffled by the wind,’ he went on, ‘as Lorenzo so admirably describes it in his poem on the Ambra.

‘What an incautious quotation!’ said Lamia; ‘and, were I a critic, I should at once fasten on you a charge of gross plagiarism. I remember, if you do not:—

‘Have I not established my case?’

‘Completely, my dear Lamia; and I am glad to find myself in such excellent company as that of Lorenzo, more especially now that we have taken possession of a villa where he must often have been a guest, with Politian for host, and Poggio and Pico della Mirandola for companions.‘ ‘I fear,’ said Lamia modestly, ‘I should have found them too learned to be congenial society.’

‘Not when Lorenzo was with them; for he assimilated their learning to life, and contrived to make gaiety out of their scholarship. With more even than the statesmanship of his grandfather, and of whom it may equally be said that he ruled without arms and without a title, endowed with no inconsiderable portion of the culture of the students he so generously abetted, Lorenzo was a thorough man-of-the-world, and more than a respectable man-of-letters. I recommend to you his description, in the Selve d’ Amore, of the shepherd leading his flock from the wintry fold to the Spring pasture, and carrying in his arms a newly-dropped lamb, his sonnet on the origin of the violet, and, still more perhaps, the one in praise of rural sights, sounds, and solitude. Permit me to cite at least a portion of it:—

‘I fear,’ said Lamia, ‘I have not yet made sufficient progress in my studies to follow your recitation completely. Will you kindly translate?’

‘Let a spontaneous paraphrase suffice, which will reproduce the original with, if with less literary perhaps with more spiritual, accuracy.

‘Surely it is strange,’ I said, ‘that a man so occupied with affairs of State as Lorenzo, conspiring and conspired against from morning to night, a landowner not indifferent to the prosperity of his estate, a banker attentive to the profitable employment of his capital, a father most anxious for the wise bringing up of his sons, a collector of manuscripts, gems and intaglios, a founder of libraries, an owner of alum mines, a prince, a statesman, and a diplomatist, should not only have experienced such a sentiment as you have cited, but should have found leisure to give expression to it.’

‘And in so short a space of time,’ said Lamia, more indulgent than usual to my observations. ‘Was he not only forty-one when he died?’

‘He was,’ I said, ‘but he seems to have lived every hour of his life, and to have acted on the principle he lays down in his contribution to the Disputationes Camaldulenses, that life should consist in equal parts of action and contemplation; thereby being rather at issue with Plato, whom he loved so well. But even in his most contemplative moods he never seems to be divorced from the themes that interest mankind. There is a passage in a poem of his expository of the Platonic Philosophy which some critics have thought gave Michelangelo the suggestion for his famous marble Sonno, which you will shortly see in the Sacristy of San Lorenzo; while, in his Simposio there is a description of a toping friar which is worthy of Chaucer, and in the Canzoni a Ballo and the Canti Carnascialeschi, which I cannot recommend you to read save in what you will scarcely find, an expurgated edition, he expresses the very thoughts, feelings, and ideals of the populace of Florence.’

‘Veronica shall be my Bowdler,’ said Lamia, ‘and meanwhile I thank you for your erudition! But, as it happens to be my birthday, do you think you could forget the Medici for a few moments, if only to wish me, in the most conventional manner, “many happy returns”?‘

I had not forgotten the circumstance, and indeed had armed myself with a propitiatory gift which I intended to offer later in the day. But, before I could stammer out my excuses, she put her hand in that of the Poet, and said:

‘Perhaps you have forgotten that, not very long ago, you rebuked me most gently for one of my numerous foibles, and that I asked you to tell me what I ought to do, and to be, in order to merit your approval. Will you, for a birthday present, tell me now?’

We had come, in our saunterings, to the long low wall, leaning over which we gazed down direct on Florence.

‘With pleasure,’ he said, ‘and I must only hope you will not think me too severe.

A BIRTHDAY PRESENT

O these poets! I need scarcely say that, after this insidious effusion, I stowed away the present I had intended for Lamia in a secret drawer, reserving it for some more propitious occasion. I hope I am not prejudiced when I say that the verses were scarcely among the Poet’s happier compositions. But diamonds would have lacked lustre, after such metrical adulation.

But did you go all that way, it will perhaps be asked, and introduce Lamia to the acknowledged fascinations of Tuscany, only to wander in search of wild-flowers, to climb rural hill-sides, to rave about scenery and sunshine, to listen reverentially to the Poet’s rhymes, and to discuss things in general, and Lamia’s favourite themes in particular? Surely, you may be disposed to add, all those things could have been done just as well at home. Had Florence itself, its churches, its palaces, its galleries, its storied thoroughfares, no attraction for you all?

Indeed they had. But these have been written about with such minuteness by the learned, and with such fervour by the enthusiastic, that you would hardly thank so homely a pen as mine for describing them afresh. Moreover, let it be confessed that we had a way of our own, which is hardly the common way, of impressing Lamia’s sensitive mind with the artistic marvels of the City of Flowers. To the rest of us, Florence was already as familiar even as the Garden that we love, and the Poet had a theory, in which I entirely concurred, as to how Lamia’s familiarity should grow to be like ours, with a reserved freshness of its own. ‘There are two ways,’ he said, ‘of approaching a place like Florence. You can try to take possession of it, or you can allow it to take possession of you. The first is the more usual, but the second is, I would suggest, the more excellent way. Once when I was travelling hitherward, I remember an American tourist who was the only other occupant of the railway compartment, asking me if I knew Pisa; and, on my replying that I did, he said he should be much obliged if I would point it out to him. Shortly we approached it, and the train slackened pace in order to make the customary halt of some seven or eight minutes. “This is Pisa,” I said, and he at once leaned out of the window, and there he remained intently gazing till its Duomo, Leaning Tower, and Baptistery, could be seen no more. Then he turned to me, and said, “I thank you, sir, for showing me Pisa. I should not have liked to return to the States without having seen Pisa.” I beg of you not to take my fellow-traveller as a national type, for Americans are as various, and differ from each other as much, as the people of other countries. But I cannot think he had seen Pisa. Yet numbers of people resemble him in their tacit assumption that a hasty visual impression or snapshot, so to speak, deserves to be described as seeing, though, assuredly, where great works of art are concerned, it is not to see with the mind’s eye, to say nothing of the spirit’s.‘

‘I am easily taken possession of, as you know,’ said Lamia, for a moment pointedly turning to me, who certainly know nothing of the kind, and indeed know very much the reverse, and then redirecting her attention to the Poet. ‘But, if one is to be taken possession of by all the lovely places and things in this world, would not one have to live to a rather venerable age?’

‘There is an alternative,’ I said, ‘is there not? which is to be taken possession of by only some of them, but to be taken possession of by these thoroughly.’

‘How conjugal and domestic that sounds. But it makes no allowance for feminine curiosity. I should be sorry, when we leave Florence, to think there was anything in it worth seeing I had not seen.‘ ‘Neither shall there be, I hope,’ said the Poet, ‘but, if one is really to see what is worth seeing, I think one must bridle one’s curiosity a little about much that is not worth seeing. The specialist, no doubt, must be boundlessly curious concerning his particular pursuit, and the professional student of Art is a specialist. We are, at best, only dilettanti, and seek solely to expand our minds through sympathetic and discriminating enjoyment.‘

‘In fact,’ said Lamia, ‘it is with Art as with Life. If one is to enjoy it, one must not know too much about it. In that case, I can promise myself, during the next few weeks, no end of pleasure.’

We none of us, unless it be Veronica sometimes, resent Lamia’s seemingly irrelevant way of diverting a discussion, and the Poet has less reason than any of us to do so, since she not only accepts his utterances as words of absolute wisdom, but invariably strives to shape herself according to his canons of life and conduct. Accordingly, when we descended into Florence, which was pretty often, she manifested neither impatience nor curiosity, but suffered herself to fall into the fortuitous fashion of wandering about it that he recommended. We had neither guide nor guide-book; and, if any of us showed a disposition to enter here or to linger there, we entered or lingered as a matter of course. Lamia was left to her own impulses in giving much or little attention to tomb, fresco, statue, altar-piece, pulpit, or doorway; nor was she distracted by any information concerning them till she asked for it. Then, indeed, it was given most willingly, and it was rarely that one or other of us could not answer her inquiries. The Poet and I were sometimes at fault, but Veronica never. If you think that by such a method as this much must have been overlooked that is well deserving of notice, you must remember there was nothing to prevent us from returning to the same chapel or sacristy, the same monument or bas-relief, again and again; and, so varying is the human mood in general, and Lamia’s mood in particular, that what she would pass by on one occasion would wholly engross her attention in another. Thus there was a certain method underlying our apparent purposelessness, and I fancy she ended by knowing fully as much about Florence as those who order their visits to its innumerable treasures, while I am sure she enjoyed herself infinitely more. Moreover, this unsystematic system of artistic vagrancy issued sometimes in welcome surprises that extended the experience of all of us. One evening, for instance, just as we were on the point of quitting the city and driving homeward, Lamia said:

‘Let us go into the Duomo for a few minutes.’

‘But it is so dark,’ I suggested, ‘you will see nothing!’

We entered, nevertheless. It was the eve of Good Friday, when, according to the Roman Catholic Ritual, the Host, instead of being enshrined as usual on the High Altar, is, in commemoration of the sacred tragedy of Calvary, borne to a dimly-lighted Sepulchre, where, all night long, the faithful come to watch and pray. The Office of TenebrÆ was just over, and the worshippers had all passed out of the Cathedral. There remained in the doubtful light only a Verger and ourselves, till, from either side of the Choir, there emerged a figure robed in black, and bearing a lighted torch. Slowly, solemnly, and parallel to each other, they skirted the inner walls of the building, till they met at the main doorway, and then, at the same grave pace, they walked up the long empty nave. I had a surmise of what was signified by this slow and lonely procession, but in order to be quite sure I said to the Verger:

‘Cosa fanno?’ (What are they doing?)

‘Cercano Il Signore, e non lo trovano,’ he replied. (They are looking for Our Lord, and cannot find Him.)

We all had heard the reply. Then we quitted the Duomo, and drove home in silence.

Surely it is true, is it not, that accidental experiences have a sharper savour and leave behind them a more enduring reminiscence than projected ones? What one expects but rarely comes up to expectation, and has generally cost some thought or trouble to procure. What happens unexpectedly, if it be of the welcome kind, finds one disarmed and indisposed to criticise, and the emotion it excites is all sheer gain, no price of admission, to so speak, having been paid for it. Just as wandering along a river is more agreeable than walking along a canal, so people who canalise their lives and prearrange their enjoyments lose much of the enchantment which attends the guiding beneficence of chance. In Florence, you can scarcely halt anywhere, but story sacred or profane, saint or scholar, painter or patriot, poet, martyr, or enthusiast, has left some indelible trace to mark and glorify the spot, and to make you lift your head and then your heart. The very lapidary inscriptions let into the walls where architect or sculptor, jurist or astronomer once abode, are a continual invitation to the wayfarer to pause, to read, to ponder. Nor is it perhaps the most famous or the best known that are the most interesting and suggestive. The Poet seemed to have a special faculty for arresting our footsteps by those most worthy of contemplation. ‘Is not this one,’ he said, ‘peculiarly consolatory in a period like the present, when most people, and the Italians especially, seem to think that originality consists in artificial novelty and even grotesqueness—for that is where such novelty too often leads—of manner and expression.’

Thereupon he read: ‘Qui visse e morÌ Benedetto da Majano, chi nelle opere sue confrontÒ con venustÀ di stile e di forme le grandi idee del genio creatore.’ (Here lived and died Benedetto da Maiano, who in his works conferred charm of style and beauty of form on the lofty ideas of creative genius.)

‘To do that,’ he said, ‘is to overcome the main difficulty and solve the essential problem of Art, whether in marble or in language. In our day, too many persons shirk the difficulty and ignore the problem, and seek to conceal the poverty of their ideas under the extravagance of their manner.’

‘Some of these are very successful,’ I ventured to observe.

‘Not,’ said Veronica, ‘if in the notion of success be included that of succession. Congratulated to-day, will they not be consigned to oblivion to-morrow, when right taste has resumed its authority, or when some one yet more extravagant creates an impression, equally sudden and equally transitory, of a somewhat similar character?’

‘I think so,’ said the Poet, ‘and I am sufficiently enamoured of venustÀ di stile to hope so. As great a master of style as this century has produced says somewhere, “On peut tout dire dans le style simple et correct des bons auteurs. Les expressions violentes viennent toujours ou d’une prÉtention, ou de l’ignorance de nos richesses rÉelles.” Do you mind, Lamia, committing that sentence to memory, for I see you sometimes deeply immersed in works of much pretension, but consisting for the most part of expressions violentes, though I never observe you admiring in marble or on canvas the violence or the profuse colouring you occasionally tolerate in language?‘

‘Is it not,’ said Veronica, ‘that in architecture, painting, and sculpture, the manner in which a thing is done is so much more conspicuous, so to speak, than what is done, that failure, whether it arise from feebleness or from violence, strikes us at once; whereas, in language, what is said, if interesting in itself, makes us indulgent to, and indeed forgetful of, the manner of saying it?’

‘I suppose that is so,’ he answered; ‘and perhaps it is one of the incidental drawbacks to literature. Fortunately, however, what you say is more true of prose than of verse; defect of style in poetry being at least as obvious to fastidious readers as in marble. And yet,’ he added, ‘in our time, a grotesque, violent, and what seems to me lamentable way of saying things has been more than tolerated in verse, for the sake of the things said. For my part, I should be sorry to be original, either in prose or verse, at the expense of truth or beauty.’

The absence of method in our visits to cloister or gallery seemed to govern most of our movements. Sometimes we were but two, sometimes but three, of a company; and it would happen that, when we were four, we lost touch of each other for a time, and went our separate ways. Veronica not infrequently was missing; and generally, when this occurred, when she returned alone to the villa, she brought with her some ‘object of antiquity,’ as the Florentine dealers in curios and old furniture call such things, purchased after considerable thought and much bargaining. I think you know Veronica has a large heart, and would defraud no one of his due, and indeed would give any one more than his due, where no bargaining was in question. But she knows just as much about the date and value of cassettone, triptych, or embroidery, as any of the various dealers on the Ponte Vecchio or in the Via de’ Serragli; and she not unnaturally enjoyed displaying her peculiar learning in those interesting haunts. Her perfect familiarity with the language, and indeed even with Florentine patois, added to her advantage and strengthened her position in appraising the value of mediÆval picture-frame or sixteenth-century mirror. Moreover, it is the greatest possible error to suppose that Florentine dealers are consumed with a single-minded desire to rob unwary purchasers; and I am convinced they much preferred to conclude a fair bargain with Veronica, than an unfair one with the first ignorant comer. Oriental ways and traditions of business still linger sufficiently with them to make prezzo fisso or a rigidly-fixed price exceedingly distasteful. Their day is long, they have abundance of time on their hands, and, if the few things they sell in the course of the week were sold without demur and in a couple of minutes, life would be insufferably tedious for want of human intercourse and agreeable conversation. Veronica invariably regaled us with minute accounts, on the occasion of each fresh purchase, of the polite but protracted controversy that had attended it; and very diverting these were. She preferred to conduct these transactions without our company; for, in the first place, as she truly enough remarked, we knew nothing whatever upon the subject and could therefore be of no use to her, and, in the second place, when we honoured her with our useless society, one or other of us invariably ended by showing signs of impatience, and to be impatient over a bargain is inevitably to get the worst of it. She did not always come off a winner in these friendly encounters; and she was just as candid and as diverting in confessing her defeats as in recording her victories. On one occasion she suffered a peculiarly humiliating disaster, which she detailed with much zest at her own expense. Wishing to give an agreeable surprise to Lamia on the occasion of that Birthday, when, as you will perhaps remember, I was so sorely discomfited, she went in search of some amber beads which Lamia had more than once expressed a longing to find in order to complete a set she already possessed. But it was indispensable they should be of a special hue. At length, Veronica discovered some in a shop in the Por Santa Maria, but, do what she would, and notwithstanding all her Florentine wit, she could not bring the owner of them into what she deemed a reasonable frame of mind as regards price.

‘Ebbene,’ she said, ‘I will try elsewhere,’

She tried everywhere, but in vain, and so at length had to go back to the Por Santa Maria, and say she would take the beads at the man’s own price.

‘But now, Signora mia,’ he said, ‘that is no longer the price: you can find no others in Florence to suit you, so these in the meantime have become more valuable.’ And he added some insignificant sum to the original figure, more for the sake of triumph than from any mercenary motive. Had Veronica been making a purchase for herself, I am sure she would have defrauded him of his victory by leaving him in possession pf his amber treasures. But she would not disappoint Lamia, and so paid the forfeit of her unsuccessful strategy.

But we had a less humorous and far more touching experience on another occasion. Visiting a hillside village some twenty-five miles away, we were all much taken by a small altar-piece, a Presentation in the Temple, which stood in a side-chapel in a little church of otherwise no particular pretension. We discussed, then and there, by whom it may have been painted, for I need scarcely say that, on that subject, we all, like so many other people, consider ourselves exceedingly expert, and quite competent to express an opinion. The Parroco, a venerable Priest of courtly manners but much humility, did not affect to adjudicate among us, but was evidently much interested in our deliberations, and still more in our admiration of the picture. At last he hesitatingly asked Veronica if we should like to become the owners of it. This had certainly not occurred to us, and we were rather taken aback by the question. But Veronica, enchanted at the chance of an unexpected bit of bargaining, said ‘Yes,’ without a moment’s hesitation. So modest a sum, however, was asked, if compared with the high artistic qualities we had been attributing to it, that it went against her conscience, which, as you know, is the strongest part of her, to offer anything less. Moreover, she probably remembered, on second thoughts, that the place was not a suitable one for financial transactions; and any remaining scruple we might have had in completing the bargain was set at rest by his telling us that he had long been anxious to buy a second-hand harmonium that was for sale, whereby the services of his little church could be conducted in a more seemly manner.

The picture was carried off; and, by the time it had been in our possession forty-eight hours, its artistic value had enormously increased, and there was hardly any Umbrian painter, Raphael perhaps excepted, to whom we were not ready to ascribe it. We discussed, over and over again, where it should be hung when we returned to England, and first one position of honour and then another was suggested for it. But, as I knew well enough from the first would turn out to be the case, it was finally assigned by Veronica to the Poet’s study.

For a week she had the satisfaction of seeing all of us as much interested in, and as proud of, a purchase as herself. But, on the morning of the eighth day after our mountain excursion, the old Priest suddenly made his appearance at the villa, whither he had walked all the way; and, in a state of much agitation, he said that he had come to ask us to give him back the picture, the price of which he would restore and which he had in his hand. At first there was a protesting chorus, and Veronica was particularly eloquent in pointing out that the request was most unreasonable, as we had given the full amount asked for, without any demur. Thereupon the poor old man explained, with tears in his eyes, that his parishioners had missed the picture, and, though he had told them of his intended purchase of the harmonium, they insisted on its being restored to its traditional home, and all his pleas and arguments had proved unavailing with them. To such an appeal but one answer was possible. The picture was returned, and the Poet’s study will never see that Umbrian masterpiece. Our disappointment was great; but why, said Veronica, should everybody be disappointed? Poor old man! He stood there a most touching figure. So we put our hearts and purses together; and the sound of the second-hand harmonium now follows on his quavering voice, when, in answer to his Dominus vobiscum, the entire mountain congregation shrills out, to its instrumental accompaniment, Et cum spiritu tuo.

As a rule, however, Veronica’s purchases, over and above being definitive, were as useful as they were ornamental; and it sometimes seemed as though Lamia’s predictions concerning the transformation that was gradually to come over the villa were about to be fulfilled. Veronica invariably declared that the furniture she brought back with her from the Via Maggio, or the Piazza Santa Maria Novella, was intended strictly for home consumption, and would in due course be packed and dispatched to England. Where she would find room in a house already remarkably well stocked, was a mystery to all of us; and meanwhile it remained on the spot, to whose aspect it certainly added finish and charm, and to whose commodiousness it materially contributed.

‘I told you,’ said Lamia, ‘I should end by having a comfortable armchair, and you see I have. Nor can I well doubt that a host of work-people have been secretly introduced by Veronica, for I can now count on my bell ringing with absolute certainty; and, as for Placida and Perfetta,’—Placida and Perfetta were two handmaidens,—‘though they still regard fair words and sweet smiles as the principal ingredients of domestic service, they have developed a talent for tidying my drawers and arranging my toilet-table which cannot but have proceeded from severe drilling by Veronica, while you and I were discussing the Infinite under the shade of cheerful boughs. Shortly after we first came, Veronica gave one of our dear devoted but somewhat primitive attendants a sponge, for what purpose I cannot say. But this domestic novelty was found so useful, that each of them in turn, she discovered, had the loan of it, till it came to enjoy an absolute monopoly in the cleaning of the establishment. Now, I believe, sponges, and all other requisites of a well-ordered place of residence, are as plentiful as blackberries. Do you remember,’ she said, turning to me, ‘your giving me some most lovely flowers last week, which, of course, I treasured beyond words, even after they had faded? But I discovered, the next morning, that Perfetta, moved by a spirit of economy which seems to be a perfect passion with these dear people, was applying them, on the carpet, to the same purpose, I am told, for which we sometimes use tea-leaves in England. That was a sad ending, was it not, to your lovely gift?’

Lamia’s observation on ‘the principal ingredients of domestic service,’ as understood in Italy by those who render it, was strictly accurate. They wait on you with a smile, and minister to your need with copious conversation. They will end by giving you all you ask for; but you must ask, and you must not expect that, having asked for it ninety-nine times, you will get it the hundredth, without asking for it again. That would be to defraud them, and you as well, of an opportunity of talk, the thing they love most in the world. Moreover, they have an invincible objection to being made methodical; nor can you give them greater pleasure than to ask them to do the work naturally pertaining to somebody else. The cook would be delighted to nurse the baby, the housemaid would find it quite natural to be bidden to cook the dinner, the butler would eagerly go in search of the vegetables, and the gardener at once mount the box and drive you into Florence. Only do not ask them to be perfect, according to English ideas, in their own line. They will do anything on earth for you, if you go the right way about it; but they will not be turned into machines. Nothing I have ever seen in Veronica is more admirable, or shows so conclusively the discrimination she can blend with her love of order, than the amount of method, limited no doubt but quite unusual, with which, for the time at least, she imbued those about us; and Lamia, as we have seen, indulged in a little characteristic raillery on the subject.

‘It is all very well,’ said the Poet, ‘for us to have our little joke about a certain person’s passion for discipline. But, upon my word, what Italy stands in need of is a Ruler with plenary powers, of the temperament and talents of Veronica. So the Roman Empire was founded, so the British. Dear Lamia, you are very charming; our friend here is, I do not forget, a gardener of much repute, and I write verses which, I am told, sometimes give pleasure to people who are easily pleased. But Veronica is worth all of us put together a hundred times over.‘

‘Quite so,’ said Lamia. ‘Veronica is our Minerva Medica, whose salutary if sometimes unpalatable wisdom keeps us in such tolerable health as moral valetudinarians like myself are capable of; whereas I am but a would-be Egeria, who have not yet succeeded in inducing any one, and you, dear Poet, least of all, to be my Numa. Still, do not judge me altogether by the way in which I conduct myself here, among a people very much after my own heart. I have a conscience, which I showed by declaring it at the frontier, as I heard it was contraband. I proved to be right; it was confiscated, and I have got on very comfortably without it ever since. Indeed, I should have missed a new gown much more. Poets, we all know, never have a conscience, in any country. But, as Veronica has enough for two, indeed—obligingly remembering my existence—for three, I daresay we shall continue to manage fairly well in this easy-going land, with Veronica’s occasional assistance.‘

At this moment, Veronica joined us under the lower loggia, where we had for some time been sitting, and desisting more frequently than perhaps you have imagined, from audible converse, in order to commune silently with the plashing of the fountain in front of us, with city, plain, and river far below, and with hill-slope and summit everywhere around us. The sun had just disappeared; and, each instant, mountain and sky grew more and more unreal, more and more transfigured in the afterglow. The last Ave Maria bell had rung; the last wain drawn by the sleek, swaying oxen had creaked up the hill; and, somewhere among the more distant olives, a peasant lingering at his work, but pondering aloud on his love, sang out with clear voice to the clear air:

‘You never told us,’ said Veronica, ‘what you two did yesterday afternoon.’ The two were the Poet and Lamia.

‘You scarcely gave us the chance,’ Lamia replied. ‘We were all so absorbed in admiring the bust you brought from Florence of the founder of the Magliabecchian Library, whose name I have already forgotten, but who was himself, you told us, what you, dear Veronica, will become if you go on accumulating stray black-letter volumes at the rate you are doing at present,—quÆdam bibliotheca. But have a care. What if they were lost or stolen? I was reading only yesterday that, when Guarino, returning to Florence from Constantinople with a cargo of Greek manuscripts, was shipwrecked, and all his treasures went to the bottom of the sea, his hair turned white. See how well-informed I am getting. I can tell you still more on this interesting subject, and indeed meditate lecturing on it next winter in the Sala Dante. Cosimo de’ Medici healed a political breach with Alfonso of Naples by sending him a Manuscript of Livy; and Lorenzo declared to Pico della Mirandola, probably where we are now sitting, that, if his fortune proved insufficient, he would pledge his furniture in order to buy books. But, when your purse gives out, you will spare my easy-chair, Veronica, won’t you?‘

‘You have still not told us where you went yesterday afternoon.’

Lamia remained silent; leaving it to the Poet to reply:

‘We carried some flowers to the grave of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.’

Again there was silence. Then, shortly, Veronica asked:

‘Did nothing come of it?’

We all well knew the meaning of the question, and so did he, and accordingly replied:

‘Well, yes, something came of it, such as it is’; and, not waiting for us to express a desire he was aware we all entertained, he unaffectedly recited to us the following lines:—

AT HER GRAVE