council-hall of a free people; but our own little Faneuil, which was
meant, in all simplicity, to be merely a spot where the townspeople
should meet to choose their selectmen, has served the world better in
that respect. I wish I had more room to speak of this vast, dusky,
historic hall. [This volume of journal closes here.]


July 4th 1858.--Yesterday forenoon we went to see the Church of Santa
Maria Novella. We found the piazza, on one side of which the church
stands, encumbered with the amphitheatrical ranges of wooden seats that
had been erected to accommodate the spectators of the chariot-races, at
the recent Feast of St. John. The front of the church is composed of
black and white marble, which, in the course of the five centuries that
it has been built, has turned brown and yellow. On the right hand, as
you approach, is a long colonnade of arches, extending on a line with the
facade, and having a tomb beneath every arch. This colonnade forms one
of the enclosing walls of a cloister. We found none of the front
entrances open, but on our left, in a wall at right angles with the
church, there was an open gateway, approaching which, we saw, within the
four-sided colonnade, an enclosed green space of a cloister. This is
what is called the Chiostro Verde, so named from the prevailing color of
the frescos with which the walls beneath the arches are adorned.

This cloister is the reality of what I used to imagine when I saw the
half-ruinous colonnades connected with English cathedrals, or endeavored
to trace out the lines along the broken wall of some old abbey. Not that
this extant cloister, still perfect and in daily use for its original
purposes, is nearly so beautiful as the crumbling ruin which has ceased
to be trodden by monkish feet for more than three centuries. The
cloister of Santa Maria has not the seclusion that is desirable, being