again, because we go to bed by electricity and have our hair brushed by
machinery? Pray, has Nature ceased? or Life? Art will endure with these
fine things, which in Florence, let me say, are very fine indeed. But
there's a practical answer to the indictment. As a city she is a mere
cupful. You can walk from Cantagalli's, at the Roman Gate, to the Porta
San Gallo, at the end of the Via Cavour, in half the time it would take
you to go from Newgate to Kensington Gardens. Yet whereas in London such a
walk would lead you through a slice of a section, in Florence you would
cut through the whole city from hill to hill. You are never away from the
velvet flanks of the Tuscan hills. Every street-end smiles an enchanting
vista upon you. Houses frowning, machicolated and sombre, or gay and
golden-white with cool green jalousies and spreading eaves, stretch before
you through mellow air to a distance where they melt into hills, and hills
into sky; into sky so clear and rarely blue, so virgin pale at the
horizon, that the hills sleep brown upon it under the sun, and the
cypresses, nodding a-row, seem funeral weeds beside that radiant purity.
Some such adorable stretch of tilth and pasture, sky and cloud, hangs like
a god's crown beyond the city and her towers. In the long autumn twilight
Fiesole and the hills lie soft and purple below a pale green sky. There is
a pause at this time when the air seems washed for sleep-every shrub,
every feature of the landscape is cut clean as with a blade. The light
dies, the air deepens to wet violet, and the glimpses of the hill-town
gleam like snow. At such times Samminiato looms ghostly upon you and fades
slowly out. The flush in the East faints and fails and the evening star
shines like a gem. It is hot and still in the broad Piazza Santa Maria;
they are lighting the lamps; the swarm grows of the eager, shabby,
spendthrift crowd of young Italians, so light-hearted and fluent, and so
prodigal of this old Italy of theirs--and ours. All this I have been
watching as I might. Nature clings to the city, playing her rhythmic dance
at the end of every street.