with envy of desire to be some one else, as in our sickly,
hurrying time most people are.

Yes, life must have been very good in those old days in old
Urbino, better than it is anywhere in ours.

Can you not picture to yourself good, shrewd, wise Giovanni
Sanzio, with his old father by his side, and his little son
running before him, in the holy evening time of a feast day, with
the deep church bells swaying above-head, and the last sun-rays
smiting the frescoed walls, the stone bastions, the blazoned
standard on the castle roof, the steep city rocks shelving down
into the greenery of cherry orchard and of pear tree? I can,
whenever I shut my eyes and recall Urbino as it was; and would it
had been mine to live then in that mountain home, and meet that
divine child going along his happy smiling way, garnering
unconsciously in his infant soul all the beautiful sights and
sounds around him, to give them in his manhood to the world.

"Let him alone: he will paint all this some day," said his wise
father, who loved to think that his brushes and his colors would
pass in time to Raffaelle, whose hands would be stronger to hold
them than his own had been. And, whether he would ever paint it or
not, the child never tired of thus looking from his eyrie on the
rocks and counting all that passed below through the blowing corn
under the leafy orchard boughs.

There were so many things to see in Urbino in that time, looking
so over the vast green valley below: a clump of spears, most
likely, as men-at-arms rode through the trees; a string of market