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Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks, Volume 2.

by Nathaniel Hawthorne · English · Gutenberg #7880 · 499,040 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks, Volume 2.

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne


        
Release date: April 1, 2005 [eBook #7880]
                Most recently updated: December 17, 2011

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7880

Credits: Produced by Tapio Riikonen and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PASSAGES FROM THE FRENCH AND ITALIAN NOTEBOOKS, VOLUME 2. ***




Produced by Tapio Riikonen and David Widger








PASSAGES FROM HAWTHORNE'S NOTE-BOOKS IN FRANCE AND ITALY.




FLORENCE (Continued).


June 8th.--I went this morning to the Uffizi gallery.  The entrance is
from the great court of the palace, which communicates with Lung' Arno at
one end, and with the Grand Ducal Piazza at the other.  The gallery is in
the upper story of the palace, and in the vestibule are some busts of the
princes and cardinals of the Medici family,--none of them beautiful, one
or two so ugly as to be ludicrous, especially one who is all but buried
in his own wig.  I at first travelled slowly through the whole extent of
this long, long gallery, which occupies the entire length of the palace
on both sides of the court, and is full of sculpture and pictures.  The
latter, being opposite to the light, are not seen to the best advantage;
but it is the most perfect collection, in a chronological series, that I
have seen, comprehending specimens of all the masters since painting
began to be an art.  Here are Giotto, and Cimabue, and Botticelli, and
Fra Angelico, and Filippo Lippi, and a hundred others, who have haunted
me in churches and galleries ever since I have been in Italy, and who
ought to interest me a great deal more than they do.  Occasionally to-day
I was sensible of a certain degree of emotion in looking at an old
picture; as, for example, by a large, dark, ugly picture of Christ
hearing the cross and sinking beneath it, when, somehow or other, a sense
of his agony, and the fearful wrong that mankind did (and does) its
Redeemer, and the scorn of his enemies, and the sorrow of those who loved
him, came knocking at any heart and got entrance there.  Once more I deem
it a pity that Protestantism should have entirely laid aside this mode of
appealing to the religious sentiment.

I chiefly paid attention to the sculpture, and was interested in a long
series of busts of the emperors and the members of their families, and
some of the great men of Rome.  There is a bust of Pompey the Great,
bearing not the slightest resemblance to that vulgar and unintellectual
one in the gallery of the Capitol, altogether a different cast of
countenance.  I could not judge whether it resembled the face of the
statue, having seen the latter so imperfectly in the duskiness of the
hall of the Spada Palace.  These, I presume, are the busts which Mr.
Powers condemns, from internal evidence, as unreliable and conventional.
He may be right,--and is far more likely, of course, to be right than I
am,--yet there certainly seems to be character in these marble faces, and
they differ as much among themselves as the same number of living faces
might.  The bust of Caracalla, however, which Powers excepted from his
censure, certainly does give stronger assurance of its being an
individual and faithful portrait than any other in the series.  All the
busts of Caracalla--of which I have seen many--give the same evidence of
their truth; and I should like to know what it was in this abominable
emperor that made him insist upon having his actual likeness perpetuated,
with all the ugliness of its animal and moral character.  I rather
respect him for it, and still more the sculptor, whose hand, methinks,
must have trembled as he wrought the bust.  Generally these wicked old
fellows, and their wicked wives and daughters, are not so hideous as we
might expect.  Messalina, for instance, has small and pretty features,
though with rather a sensual development of the lower part of the face.
The busts, it seemed to me, are usually superior as works of art to those
in the Capitol, and either better preserved or more thoroughly restored.
The bust of Nero might almost be called handsome here, though bearing his
likeness unmistakably.

I wish some competent person would undertake to analyze and develop his
character, and how and by what necessity--with all his elegant tastes,
his love of the beautiful, his artist nature--he grew to be such a
monster.  Nero has never yet had justice done him, nor have any of the
wicked emperors; not that I suppose them to have been any less monstrous
than history represents them; but there must surely have been something
in their position and circumstances to render the terrible moral disease
which seized upon them so generally almost inevitable.  A wise and
profound man, tender and reverent of the human soul, and capable of
appreciating it in its height and depth, has a great field here for the
exercise of his powers.  It has struck me, in reading the history of the
Italian republics, that many of the tyrants, who sprung up after the
destruction of their liberties, resembled the worst of the Roman
emperors.  The subject of Nero and his brethren has often perplexed me
with vain desires to come at the truth.

There were many beautiful specimens of antique, ideal sculpture all along
the gallery,--Apollos, Bacchuses, Venuses, Mercurys, Fauns,--with the
general character of all of which I was familiar enough to recognize them
at a glance.  The mystery and wonder of the gallery, however, the Venus
de' Medici, I could nowhere see, and indeed was almost afraid to see it;
for I somewhat apprehended the extinction of another of those lights that
shine along a man's pathway, and go out in a snuff the instant he comes
within eyeshot of the fulfilment of his hopes.  My European experience
has extinguished many such.  I was pretty well contented, therefore, not
to find the famous statue in the whole of my long journey from end to end
of the gallery, which terminates on the opposite side of the court from
that where it commences.  The ceiling, by the by, through the entire
length, is covered with frescos, and the floor paved with a composition
of stone smooth and polished like marble.  The final piece of sculpture,
at the end of the gallery, is a copy of the Laocoon, considered very
fine.  I know not why, but it did not impress me with the sense of mighty
and terrible repose--a repose growing out of the infinitude of trouble--
that I had felt in the original.

Parallel with the gallery, on both sides of the palace-court, there runs
a series of rooms devoted chiefly to pictures, although statues and
bas-reliefs are likewise contained in some of them.  I remember an
unfinished bas-relief by Michael Angelo of a Holy Family, which I touched
with my finger, because it seemed as if he might have been at work upon
it only an hour ago.  The pictures I did little more than glance at, till
I had almost completed again the circuit of the gallery, through this
series of parallel rooms, and then I came upon a collection of French and
Dutch and Flemish masters, all of which interested me more than the
Italian generally.  There was a beautiful picture by Claude, almost as
good as those in the British National Gallery, and very like in subject;
the sun near the horizon, of course, and throwing its line of light over
the ripple of water, with ships at the strand, and one or two palaces of
stately architecture on the shore.  Landscapes by Rembrandt; fat Graces
and other plump nudities by Rubens; brass pans and earthen pots and
herrings by Terriers and other Dutchmen; none by Gerard Douw, I think,
but several by Mieris; all of which were like bread and beef and ale,
after having been fed too long on made dishes.  This is really a
wonderful collection of pictures; and from first, to last--from Giotto to
the men of yesterday--they are in admirable condition, and may be
appreciated for all the merit that they ever possessed.

I could not quite believe that I was not to find the Venus de' Medici;
and still, as I passed from one room to another, my breath rose and fell
a little, with the half-hope, half-fear, that she might stand before me.
Really, I did not know that I cared so much about Venus, or any possible
woman of marble.  At last, when I had come from among the Dutchmen, I
believe, and was looking at some works of Italian artists, chiefly
Florentines, I caught a glimpse of her through the door of the next room.
It is the best room of the series, octagonal in shape, and hung with red
damask, and the light comes down from a row of windows, passing quite
round, beneath an octagonal dome.  The Venus stands somewhat aside from
the centre of the room, and is surrounded by an iron railing, a pace or
two from her pedestal in front, and less behind.  I think she might
safely be left to the reverence her womanhood would win, without any
other protection.  She is very beautiful, very satisfactory; and has a
fresh and new charm about her unreached by any cast or copy.  The line of
the marble is just so much mellowed by time, as to do for her all that
Gibson tries, or ought to try to do for his statues by color, softening
her, warming her almost imperceptibly, making her an inmate of the heart,
as well as a spiritual existence.  I felt a kind of tenderness for her;
an affection, not as if she were one woman, but all womanhood in one.
Her modest attitude, which, before I saw her I had not liked, deeming
that it might be an artificial shame, is partly what unmakes her as the
heathen goddess, and softens her into woman.  There is a slight degree of
alarm, too, in her face; not that she really thinks anybody is looking at
her, yet the idea has flitted through her mind, and startled her a
little.  Her face is so beautiful and intellectual, that it is not
dazzled out of sight by her form.  Methinks this was a triumph for the
sculptor to achieve.  I may as well stop here.  It is of no use to throw
heaps of words upon her; for they all fall away, and leave her standing
in chaste and naked grace, as untouched as when I began.

She has suffered terribly by the mishaps of her long existence in the
marble.  Each of her legs has been broken into two or three fragments,
her arms have been severed, her body has been broken quite across at the
waist, her head has been snapped off at the neck.  Furthermore, there
have been grievous wounds and losses of substance in various tender parts
of her person.  But on account of the skill with which the statue has
been restored, and also because the idea is perfect and indestructible,
all these injuries do not in the least impair the effect, even when you
see where the dissevered fragments have been reunited.  She is just as
whole as when she left the hands of the sculptor.  I am glad to have seen
this Venus, and to have found her so tender and so chaste.  On the wall
of the room, and to be taken in at the same glance, is a painted Venus by
Titian, reclining on a couch, naked and lustful.

The room of the Venus seems to be the treasure-place of the whole Uffizi
Palace, containing more pictures by famous masters than are to be found
in all the rest of the gallery.  There were several by Raphael, and the
room was crowded with the easels of artists.  I did not look half enough
at anything, but merely took a preliminary taste, as a prophecy of
enjoyment to come.

As we were at dinner to-day, at half past three, there was a ring at the
door, and a minute after our servant brought a card.  It was Mr. Robert
Browning's, and on it was written in pencil an invitation for us to go to
see them this evening.  He had left the card and gone away; but very soon
the bell rang again, and he had come back, having forgotten to give his
address.  This time he came in; and he shook hands with all of us,
children and grown people, and was very vivacious and agreeable.  He
looked younger and even handsomer than when I saw him in London, two
years ago, and his gray hairs seemed fewer than those that had then
strayed into his youthful head.  He talked a wonderful quantity in a
little time, and told us--among other things that we should never have
dreamed of--that Italian people will not cheat you, if you construe them
generously, and put them upon their honor.

Mr. Browning was very kind and warm in his expressions of pleasure at
seeing us; and, on our part, we were all very glad to meet him.  He must
be an exceedingly likable man. . . . They are to leave Florence very
soon, and are going to Normandy, I think he said, for the rest of the
summer.

The Venus de' Medici has a dimple in her chin.


June 9th.--We went last evening, at eight o'clock, to see the Brownings;
and, after some search and inquiry, we found the Casa Guidi, which is a
palace in a street not very far from our own.  It being dusk, I could not
see the exterior, which, if I remember, Browning has celebrated in song;
at all events, Mrs. Browning has called one of her poems "Casa Guidi
Windows."

The street is a narrow one; but on entering the palace, we found a
spacious staircase and ample accommodations of vestibule and hall, the
latter opening on a balcony, where we could hear the chanting of priests
in a church close by.  Browning told us that this was the first church
where an oratorio had ever been performed.  He came into the anteroom to
greet us, as did his little boy, Robert, whom they call Pennini for
fondness.  The latter cognomen is a diminutive of Apennino, which was
bestowed upon him at his first advent into the world because he was so
very small, there being a statue in Florence of colossal size called
Apennino.  I never saw such a boy as this before; so slender, fragile,
and spirit-like,--not as if he were actually in ill health, but as if he
had little or nothing to do with human flesh and blood.  His face is very
pretty and most intelligent, and exceedingly like his mother's.  He is
nine years old, and seems at once less childlike and less manly than
would befit that age.  I should not quite like to be the father of such a
boy, and should fear to stake so much interest and affection on him as he
cannot fail to inspire.  I wonder what is to become of him,--whether he
will ever grow to be a man,--whether it is desirable that he should.  His
parents ought to turn their whole attention to making him robust and
earthly, and to giving him a thicker scabbard to sheathe his spirit in.
He was born in Florence, and prides himself on being a Florentine, and is
indeed as un-English a production as if he were native of another planet.

Mrs. Browning met us at the door of the drawing-room, and greeted us most
kindly,--a pale, small person, scarcely embodied at all; at any rate,
only substantial enough to put forth her slender fingers to be grasped,
and to speak with a shrill, yet sweet, tenuity of voice.  Really, I do
not see how Mr. Browning can suppose that he has an earthly wife any more
than an earthly child; both are of the elfin race, and will flit away
from him some day when he least thinks of it.  She is a good and kind
fairy, however, and sweetly disposed towards the human race, although
only remotely akin to it.  It is wonderful to see how small she is, how
pale her cheek, how bright and dark her eyes.  There is not such another
figure in the world; and her black ringlets cluster down into her neck,
and make her face look the whiter by their sable profusion.  I could not
form any judgment about her age; it may range anywhere within the limits
of human life or elfin life.  When I met her in London at Lord Houghton's
breakfast-table, she did not impress me so singularly; for the morning
light is more prosaic than the dim illumination of their great tapestried
drawing-room; and besides, sitting next to her, she did not have occasion
to raise her voice in speaking, and I was not sensible what a slender
voice she has.  It is marvellous to me how so extraordinary, so acute, so
sensitive a creature can impress us, as she does, with the certainty of
her benevolence.  It seems to me there were a million chances to one that
she would have been a miracle of acidity and bitterness.

We were not the only guests.  Mr. and Mrs. E------, Americans, recently
from the East, and on intimate terms with the Brownings, arrived after
us; also Miss F. H------, an English literary lady, whom I have met
several times in Liverpool; and lastly came the white head and
palmer-like beard of Mr. ------ with his daughter.  Mr. Browning was very
efficient in keeping up conversation with everybody, and seemed to be in
all parts of the room and in every group at the same moment; a most vivid
and quick-thoughted person, logical and common-sensible, as, I presume,
poets generally are in their daily talk.

Mr. ------, as usual, was homely and plain of manner, with an
old-fashioned dignity, nevertheless, and a remarkable deference and
gentleness of tone in addressing Mrs. Browning.  I doubt, however,
whether he has any high appreciation either of her poetry or her
husband's, and it is my impression that they care as little about his.

We had some tea and some strawberries, and passed a pleasant evening.
There was no very noteworthy conversation; the most interesting topic
being that disagreeable and now wearisome one of spiritual
communications, as regards which Mrs. Browning is a believer, and her
husband an infidel.  Mr. ------ appeared not to have made up his mind on
the matter, but told a story of a successful communication between Cooper
the novelist and his sister, who had been dead fifty years.  Browning and
his wife had both been present at a spiritual session held by Mr. Hume,
and had seen and felt the unearthly hands, one of which had placed a
laurel wreath on Mrs. Browning's head.  Browning, however, avowed his
belief that these hands were affixed to the feet of Mr. Hume, who lay
extended in his chair, with his legs stretched far under the table.  The
marvellousness of the fact, as I have read of it, and heard it from other
eye-witnesses, melted strangely away in his hearty gripe, and at the
sharp touch of his logic; while his wife, ever and anon, put in a little
gentle word of expostulation.

I am rather surprised that Browning's conversation should be so clear,
and so much to the purpose at the moment, since his poetry can seldom
proceed far without running into the high grass of latent meanings and
obscure allusions.

Mrs. Browning's health does not permit late hours, so we began to take
heave at about ten o'clock.  I heard her ask Mr. ------ if he did not
mean to revisit Europe, and heard him answer, not uncheerfully, taking
hold of his white hair, "It is getting rather too late in the evening
now."  If any old age can be cheerful, I should think his might be; so
good a man, so cool, so calm, so bright, too, we may say.  His life has
been like the days that end in pleasant sunsets.  He has a great loss,
however, or what ought to be a great loss,--soon to be encountered in the
death of his wife, who, I think, can hardly live to reach America.  He is
not eminently an affectionate man.  I take him to be one who cannot get
closely home to his sorrow, nor feel it so sensibly as he gladly would;
and, in consequence of that deficiency, the world lacks substance to him.
It is partly the result, perhaps, of his not having sufficiently
cultivated his emotional nature.  His poetry shows it, and his personal
intercourse, though kindly, does not stir one's blood in the least.

Little Pennini, during the evening, sometimes helped the guests to cake
and strawberries; joined in the conversation, when he had anything to
say, or sat down upon a couch to enjoy his own meditations.  He has long
curling hair, and has not yet emerged from his frock and short hose.  It
is funny to think of putting him into trousers.  His likeness to his
mother is strange to behold.


June 10th.--My wife and I went to the Pitti Palace to-day; and first
entered a court where, yesterday, she had seen a carpet of flowers,
arranged for some great ceremony.  It must have been a most beautiful
sight, the pavement of the court being entirely covered by them, in a
regular pattern of brilliant lines, so as really to be a living mosaic.
This morning, however, the court had nothing but its usual stones, and
the show of yesterday seemed so much the more inestimable as having been
so evanescent.  Around the walls of the court there were still some
pieces of splendid tapestry which had made part of yesterday's
magnificence.  We went up the staircase, of regally broad and easy
ascent, and made application to be admitted to see the grand-ducal
apartments.  An attendant accordingly took the keys, and ushered us first
into a great hall with a vaulted ceiling, and then through a series of
noble rooms, with rich frescos above and mosaic floors, hung with damask,
adorned with gilded chandeliers, and glowing, in short, with more
gorgeousness than I could have imagined beforehand, or can now remember.
In many of the rooms were those superb antique cabinets which I admire
more than any other furniture ever invented; only these were of
unexampled art and glory, inlaid with precious stones, and with beautiful
Florentine mosaics, both of flowers and landscapes,--each cabinet worth a
lifetime's toil to make it, and the cost a whole palace to pay for it.
Many of the rooms were covered with arras, of landscapes, hunting-scenes,
mythological subjects, or historical scenes, equal to pictures in truth
of representation, and possessing an indescribable richness that makes
them preferable as a mere adornment of princely halls and chambers.  Some
of the rooms, as I have said, were laid in mosaic of stone and marble,
otherwise in lovely patterns of various woods; others were covered with
carpets, delightful to tread upon, and glowing like the living floor of
flowers which my wife saw yesterday.  There were tables, too, of
Florentine mosaic, the mere materials of which--lapis lazuli, malachite,
pearl, and a hundred other precious things--were worth a fortune, and
made a thousand times more valuable by the artistic skill of the
manufacturer.  I toss together brilliant words by the handful, and make a
rude sort of patchwork, but can record no adequate idea of what I saw in
this suite of rooms; and the taste, the subdued splendor, so that it did
not shine too high, but was all tempered into an effect at once grand and
soft,--this was quite as remarkable as the gorgeous material.  I have
seen a very dazzling effect produced in the principal cabin of an
American clipper-ship quite opposed to this in taste.

After making the circuit of the grand-ducal apartments, we went into a
door in the left wing of the palace, and ascended a narrow flight of
stairs,--several tortuous flights indeed,--to the picture-gallery.  It
fills a great many stately halls, which themselves are well worth a visit
for the architecture and frescos; only these matters become commonplace
after travelling through a mile or two of them.  The collection of
pictures--as well for their number as for the celebrity and excellence of
many of them--is the most interesting that I have seen, and I do not yet
feel in a condition, nor perhaps ever shall, to speak of a single one.
It gladdened my very heart to find that they were not darkened out of
sight, nor apparently at all injured by time, but were well kept and
varnished, brilliantly framed, and, no doubt, restored by skilful touches
if any of them needed it.  The artists and amateurs may say what they
like; for my part, I know no drearier feeling than that inspired by a
ruined picture,--ruined, that is, by time, damp, or rough treatment,--and
I would a thousand times rather an artist should do his best towards
reviving it, than have it left in such a condition.  I do not believe,
however, that these pictures have been sacrilegiously interfered with; at
all events, I saw in the masterpieces no touch but what seemed worthy of
the master-hand.

The most beautiful picture in the world, I am convinced, is Raphael's
"Madonna della Seggiola."  I was familiar with it in a hundred engravings
and copies, and therefore it shone upon one as with a familiar beauty,
though infinitely more divine than I had ever seen it before.  An artist
was copying it, and producing certainly something very like a fac-simile,
yet leaving out, as a matter of course, that mysterious something that
renders the picture a miracle.  It is my present opinion that the
pictorial art is capable of something more like magic, more wonderful and
inscrutable in its methods, than poetry or any other mode of developing
the beautiful.  But how does this accord with what I have been saying
only a minute ago?  How then can the decayed picture of a great master
ever be restored by the touches of an inferior hand?  Doubtless it never
can be restored; but let some devoted worshipper do his utmost, and the
whole inherent spirit of the divine picture may pervade his restorations
likewise.

I saw the "Three Fates" of Michael Angelo, which were also being copied,
as were many other of the best pictures.  Miss Fanny Howorth, whom I met
in the gallery, told me that to copy the "Madonna della Seggiola,"
application must be made five years beforehand, so many are the artists
who aspire to copy it.  Michael Angelo's Fates are three very grim and
pitiless old women, who respectively spin, hold, and cut the thread of
human destiny, all in a mood of sombre gloom, but with no more sympathy
than if they had nothing to do with us.  I remember seeing an etching of
this when I was a child, and being struck, even then, with the terrible,
stern, passionless severity, neither loving us nor hating us, that
characterizes these ugly old women.  If they were angry, or had the least
spite against human kind, it would render them the more tolerable.  They
are a great work, containing and representing the very idea that makes a
belief in fate such a cold torture to the human soul.  God give me the
sure belief in his Providence!

In a year's time, with the advantage of access to this magnificent
gallery, I think I might come to have some little knowledge of pictures.
At present I still know nothing; but am glad to find myself capable, at
least, of loving one picture better than another.  I cannot always "keep
the heights I gain," however, and after admiring and being moved by a
picture one day, it is within my experience to look at it the next as
little moved as if it were a tavern-sign.  It is pretty much the same
with statuary; the same, too, with those pictured windows of the Duomo,
which I described so rapturously a few days ago.  I looked at them again
the next morning, and thought they would have been hardly worthy of my
eulogium, even had all the separate windows of the cathedral combined
their narrow lights into one grand, resplendent, many-colored arch at the
eastern end.  It is a pity they are so narrow.  England has many a great
chancel-window that, though dimmer in its hues, dusty, and perhaps made
up of heterogeneous fragments, eclipses these by its spacious breadth.

From the gallery, I went into the Boboli Gardens, which are contiguous to
the palace; but found them too sunny for enjoyment.  They seem to consist
partly of a wilderness; but the portion into which I strayed was laid out
with straight walks, lined with high box-hedges, along which there was
only a narrow margin of shade.  I saw an amphitheatre, with a wide sweep
of marble seat around it, enclosing a grassy space, where, doubtless, the
Medici may have witnessed splendid spectacles.


June 11th.--I paid another visit to the Uffizi gallery this morning, and
found that the Venus is one of the things the charm of which does not
diminish on better acquaintance.  The world has not grown weary of her in
all these ages; and mortal man may look on her with new delight from
infancy to old age, and keep the memory of her, I should imagine, as one
of the treasures of spiritual existence hereafter.  Surely, it makes me
more ready to believe in the high destinies of the human race, to think
that this beautiful form is but nature's plan for all womankind, and that
the nearer the actual woman approaches it, the more natural she is.  I do
not, and cannot think of her as a senseless image, but as a being that
lives to gladden the world, incapable of decay and death; as young and
fair to-day as she was three thousand years ago, and still to be young
and fair as long as a beautiful thought shall require physical
embodiment.  I wonder how any sculptor has had the impertinence to aim at
any other presentation of female beauty.  I mean no disrespect to Gibson
or Powers, or a hundred other men who people the world with nudities, all
of which are abortions as compared with her; but I think the world would
be all the richer if their Venuses, their Greek Slaves, their Eves, were
burnt into quicklime, leaving us only this statue as our image of the
beautiful.  I observed to-day that the eyes of the statue are slightly
hollowed out, in a peculiar way, so as to give them a look of depth and
intelligence.  She is a miracle.  The sculptor must have wrought
religiously, and have felt that something far beyond his own skill was
working through his hands.  I mean to leave off speaking of the Venus
hereafter, in utter despair of saying what I wish; especially as the
contemplation of the statue will refine and elevate my taste, and make it
continually more difficult to express my sense of its excellence, as the
perception of it grows upon one.  If at any time I become less sensible
of it, it will be my deterioration, not any defect in the statue.

I looked at many of the pictures, and found myself in a favorable mood
for enjoying them.  It seems to me that a work of art is entitled to
credit for all that it makes us feel in our best moments; and we must
judge of its merits by the impression it then makes, and not by the
coldness and insensibility of our less genial moods.

After leaving the Uffizi Palace, . . . . I went into the Museum of
Natural History, near the Pitti Palace.  It is a very good collection of
almost everything that Nature has made,--or exquisite copies of what she
has made,--stones, shells, vegetables, insects, fishes, animals, man; the
greatest wonders of the museum being some models in wax of all parts of
the human frame.  It is good to have the wholeness and summed-up beauty
of woman in the memory, when looking at the details of her system as here
displayed; for these last, to the natural eye, are by no means beautiful.
But they are what belong only to our mortality.  The beauty that makes
them invisible is our immortal type, which we shall take away with us.
Under glass cases, there were some singular and horribly truthful
representations, in small wax figures, of a time of pestilence; the hasty
burial, or tossing into one common sepulchre, of discolored corpses,--a
very ugly piece of work, indeed.  I think Murray says that these things
were made for the Grand Duke Cosmo; and if so, they do him no credit,
indicating something dark and morbid in his character.


June 13th.--We called at the Powers's yesterday morning to leave R-----
there for an hour or two to play with the children; and it being not yet
quite time for the Pitti Palace, we stopped into the studio.  Soon Mr.
Powers made his appearance, in his dressing-gown and slippers and
sculptor's cap, smoking a cigar. . . . He was very cordial and
pleasant, as I have always found him, and began immediately to be
communicative about his own works, or any other subject that came up.
There were two casts of the Venus de' Medici in the rooms, which he said
were valuable in a commercial point of view, being genuine casts from the
mould taken from the statue.  He then gave us a quite unexpected but most
interesting lecture on the Venus, demonstrating it, as he proceeded, by
reference to the points which he criticised.  The figure, he seemed to
allow, was admirable, though I think he hardly classes it so high as his
own Greek Slave or Eva; but the face, he began with saying, was that of
an idiot.  Then, leaning on the pedestal of the cast, he continued, "It
is rather a bold thing to say, isn't it, that the sculptor of the Venus
de' Medici did not know what he was about?"

Truly, it appeared to me so; but Powers went on remorselessly, and
showed, in the first place, that the eye was not like any eye that Nature
ever made; and, indeed, being examined closely, and abstracted from the
rest of the face, it has a very queer look,--less like a human eye than a
half-worn buttonhole!  Then he attacked the ear, which, he affirmed and
demonstrated, was placed a good deal too low on the head, thereby giving
an artificial and monstrous height to the portion of the head above it.
The forehead met with no better treatment in his hands, and as to the
mouth, it was altogether wrong, as well in its general make as in such
niceties as the junction of the skin of the lips to the common skin
around them.  In a word, the poor face was battered all to pieces and
utterly demolished; nor was it possible to doubt or question that it fell
by its own demerits.  All that could be urged in its defence--and even
that I did not urge--being that this very face had affected me, only the
day before, with a sense of higher beauty and intelligence than I had
ever then received from sculpture, and that its expression seemed to
accord with that of the whole figure, as if it were the sweetest note of
the same music.  There must be something in this; the sculptor
disregarded technicalities, and the imitation of actual nature, the
better to produce the effect which he really does produce, in somewhat
the same way as a painter works his magical illusions by touches that
have no relation to the truth if looked at from the wrong point of view.
But Powers considers it certain that the antique sculptor had bestowed
all his care on the study of the human figure, and really did not know
how to make a face.  I myself used to think that the face was a much less
important thing with the Greeks, among whom the entire beauty of the form
was familiarly seen, than with ourselves, who allow no other nudity.

After annihilating the poor visage, Powers showed us his two busts of
Proserpine and Psyche, and continued his lecture by showing the truth to
nature with which these are modelled.  I freely acknowledge the fact;
there is no sort of comparison to be made between the beauty,
intelligence, feeling, and accuracy of representation in these two faces
and in that of the Venus de' Medici.  A light--the light of a soul proper
to each individual character--seems to shine from the interior of the
marble, and beam forth from the features, chiefly from the eyes.  Still
insisting upon the eye, and hitting the poor Venus another and another
and still another blow on that unhappy feature, Mr. Powers turned up and
turned inward and turned outward his own Titanic orb,--the biggest, by
far, that ever I saw in mortal head,--and made us see and confess that
there was nothing right in the Venus and everything right in Psyche and
Proserpine.  To say the truth, their marble eyes have life, and, placing
yourself in the proper position towards them, you can meet their glances,
and feel them mingle with your own.  Powers is a great man, and also a
tender and delicate one, massive and rude of surface as he looks; and it
is rather absurd to feel how he impressed his auditor, for the time
being, with his own evident idea that nobody else is worthy to touch
marble.  Mr. B------ told me that Powers has had many difficulties on
professional grounds, as I understood him, and with his brother artists.
No wonder!  He has said enough in my hearing to put him at swords' points
with sculptors of every epoch and every degree between the two inclusive
extremes of Phidias and Clark Mills.

He has a bust of the reigning Grand Duchess of Tuscany, who sat to him
for it.  The bust is that of a noble-looking lady; and Powers remarked
that royal personages have a certain look that distinguishes them from
other people, and is seen in individuals of no lower rank.  They all have
it; the Queen of England and Prince Albert have it; and so likewise has
every other Royalty, although the possession of this kingly look implies
nothing whatever as respects kingly and commanding qualities.  He said
that none of our public men, whatever authority they may have held, or
for whatever length of time, possess this look, but he added afterwards
that Washington had it.  Commanders of armies sometimes have it, but not
in the degree that royal personages do.  It is, as well as I could make
out Powers's idea, a certain coldness of demeanor, and especially of eye,
that surrounds them with an atmosphere through which the electricity of
human brotherhood cannot pass.  From their youth upward they are taught
to feel themselves apart from the rest of mankind, and this manner
becomes a second nature to them in consequence, and as a safeguard to
their conventional dignity.  They put themselves under glass, as it were
(the illustration is my own), so that, though you see them, and see them
looking no more noble and dignified than other mortals, nor so much so as
many, still they keep themselves within a sort of sanctity, and repel you
by an invisible barrier.  Even if they invite you with a show of warmth
and hospitality, you cannot get through.  I, too, recognize this look in
the portraits of Washington; in him, a mild, benevolent coldness and
apartness, but indicating that formality which seems to have been deeper
in him than in any other mortal, and which built up an actual
fortification between himself and human sympathy.  I wish, for once,
Washington could come out of his envelopment and show us what his real
dimensions were.

Among other models of statues heretofore made, Powers showed us one of
Melancholy, or rather of Contemplation, from Milton's "Penseroso"; a
female figure with uplifted face and rapt look, "communing with the
skies."  It is very fine, and goes deeply into Milton's thought; but, as
far as the outward form and action are concerned, I remember seeing a
rude engraving in my childhood that probably suggested the idea.  It was
prefixed to a cheap American edition of Milton's poems, and was probably
as familiar to Powers as to myself.  It is very remarkable how difficult
it seems to be to strike out a new attitude in sculpture; a new group, or
a new single figure.

One piece of sculpture Powers exhibited, however, which was very
exquisite, and such as I never saw before.  Opening a desk, he took out
something carefully enclosed between two layers of cotton-wool, on
removing which there appeared a little baby's hand most delicately
represented in the whitest marble; all the dimples where the knuckles
were to be, all the creases in the plump flesh, every infantine wrinkle
of the soft skin being lovingly recorded.  "The critics condemn minute
representation," said Powers; "but you may look at this through a
microscope and see if it injures the general effect."  Nature herself
never made a prettier or truer little hand.  It was the hand of his
daughter,--"Luly's hand," Powers called it,--the same that gave my own
such a frank and friendly grasp when I first met "Luly."  The sculptor
made it only for himself and his wife, but so many people, he said, had
insisted on having a copy, that there are now forty scattered about the
world.  At sixty years, Luly ought to have her hand sculptured again, and
give it to her grandchildren with the baby's hand of five months old.
The baby-hand that had done nothing, and felt only its mother's kiss;
the old lady's hand that had exchanged the love-pressure, worn the
marriage-ring, closed dead eyes,--done a lifetime's work, in short.  The
sentiment is rather obvious, but true nevertheless.

Before we went away, Powers took us into a room apart--apparently the
secretest room he had--and showed us some tools and machinery, all of his
own contrivance and invention.  "You see I am a bit of a Yankee," he
observed.

This machinery is chiefly to facilitate the process of modelling his
works, for--except in portrait-busts--he makes no clay model as other
sculptors do, but models directly in the plaster; so that instead of
being crumbled, like clay, the original model remains a permanent
possession.  He has also invented a certain open file, which is of great
use in finishing the surface of the marble; and likewise a machine for
making these files and for punching holes through iron, and he
demonstrated its efficiency by punching a hole through an iron bar, with
a force equivalent to ten thousand pounds, by the mere application of a
part of his own weight.  These inventions, he says, are his amusement,
and the bent of his nature towards sculpture must indeed have been
strong, to counteract, in an American, such a capacity for the
contrivance of steam-engines. . . .

I had no idea of filling so many pages of this journal with the sayings
and characteristics of Mr. Powers, but the man and his talk are fresh,
original, and full of bone and muscle, and I enjoy him much.

We now proceeded to the Pitti Palace, and spent several hours pleasantly
in its saloons of pictures.  I never enjoyed pictures anywhere else as I
do in Florence.  There is an admirable Judith in this gallery by Allori;
a face of great beauty and depth, and her hand clutches the head of
Holofernes by the hair in a way that startles the spectator.  There are
two peasant Madonnas by Murillo; simple women, yet with a thoughtful
sense of some high mystery connected with the baby in their arms.

Raphael grows upon me; several other famous painters--Guido, for
instance--are fading out of my mind.  Salvator Rosa has two really
wonderful landscapes, looking from the shore seaward; and Rubens too,
likewise on a large scale, of mountain and plain.  It is very idle and
foolish to talk of pictures; yet, after poring over them and into them,
it seems a pity to let all the thought excited by them pass into
nothingness.

The copyists of pictures are very numerous, both in the Pitti and Uffizi
galleries; and, unlike sculptors, they appear to be on the best of terms
with one another, chatting sociably, exchanging friendly criticism, and
giving their opinions as to the best mode of attaining the desired
effects.  Perhaps, as mere copyists, they escape the jealousy that might
spring up between rival painters attempting to develop original ideas.
Miss Howorth says that the business of copying pictures, especially those
of Raphael, is a regular profession, and she thinks it exceedingly
obstructive to the progress or existence of a modern school of painting,
there being a regular demand and sure sale for all copies of the old
masters, at prices proportioned to their merit; whereas the effort to be
original insures nothing, except long neglect, at the beginning of a
career, and probably ultimate failure, and the necessity of becoming a
copyist at last.  Some artists employ themselves from youth to age in
nothing else but the copying of one single and selfsame picture by
Raphael, and grow at last to be perfectly mechanical, making, I suppose,
the same identical stroke of the brush in fifty successive pictures.

The weather is very hot now,--hotter in the sunshine, I think, than a
midsummer day usually is in America, but with rather a greater
possibility of being comfortable in the shade.  The nights, too, are
warm, and the bats fly forth at dusk, and the fireflies quite light up
the green depths of our little garden.  The atmosphere, or something
else, causes a sort of alacrity in my mind and an affluence of ideas,
such as they are; but it does not thereby make me the happier.  I feel an
impulse to be at work, but am kept idle by the sense of being unsettled
with removals to be gone through, over and over again, before I can shut
myself into a quiet room of my own, and turn the key.  I need monotony
too, an eventless exterior life, before I can live in the world within.


June 15th.--Yesterday we went to the Uffizi gallery, and, of course, I
took the opportunity to look again at the Venus de' Medici after Powers's
attack upon her face.  Some of the defects he attributed to her I could
not see in the statue; for instance, the ear appeared to be in accordance
with his own rule, the lowest part of it being about in a straight line
with the upper lip.  The eyes must be given up, as not, when closely
viewed, having the shape, the curve outwards, the formation of the lids,
that eyes ought to have; but still, at a proper distance, they seemed to
have intelligence in them beneath the shadow cast by the brow.  I cannot
help thinking that the sculptor intentionally made every feature what it
is, and calculated them all with a view to the desired effect.  Whatever
rules may be transgressed, it is a noble and beautiful face,--more so,
perhaps, than if all rules had been obeyed.  I wish Powers would do his
best to fit the Venus's figure (which he does not deny to be admirable)
with a face which he would deem equally admirable and in accordance with
the sentiment of the form.

We looked pretty thoroughly through the gallery, and I saw many pictures
that impressed me; but among such a multitude, with only one poor mind to
take note of them, the stamp of each new impression helps to obliterate a
former one.  I am sensible, however, that a process is going on, and has
been ever since I came to Italy, that puts me in a state to see pictures
with less toil, and more pleasure, and makes me more fastidious, yet more
sensible of beauty where I saw none before.  It is the sign, I presume,
of a taste still very defective, that I take singular pleasure in the
elaborate imitations of Van Mieris, Gerard Douw, and other old Dutch
wizards, who painted such brass pots that you can see your face in them,
and such earthen pots that they will surely hold water; and who spent
weeks and months in turning a foot or two of canvas into a perfect
microscopic illusion of some homely scene.  For my part, I wish Raphael
had painted the "Transfiguration" in this style, at the same time
preserving his breadth and grandeur of design; nor do I believe that
there is any real impediment to the combination of the two styles, except
that no possible space of human life could suffice to cover a quarter
part of the canvas of the "Transfiguration" with such touches as Gerard
Douw's.  But one feels the vast scope of this wonderful art, when we
think of two excellences so far apart as that of this last painter and
Raphael.  I pause a good while, too, before the Dutch paintings of fruit
and flowers, where tulips and roses acquire an immortal bloom, and grapes
have kept the freshest juice in them for two or three hundred years.
Often, in these pictures, there is a bird's-nest, every straw perfectly
represented, and the stray feather, or the down that the mother-bird
plucked from her bosom, with the three or four small speckled eggs, that
seem as if they might be yet warm.  These pretty miracles have their use
in assuring us that painters really can do something that takes hold of
us in our most matter-of-fact moods; whereas, the merits of the grander
style of art may be beyond our ordinary appreciation, and leave us in
doubt whether we have not befooled ourselves with a false admiration.

Until we learn to appreciate the cherubs and angels that Raphael scatters
through the blessed air, in a picture of the "Nativity," it is not amiss
to look at, a Dutch fly settling on a peach, or a bumblebee burying
himself in a flower.

It is another token of imperfect taste, no doubt, that queer pictures and
absurd pictures remain in my memory, when better ones pass away by the
score.  There is a picture of Venus, combing her son Cupid's head with a
small-tooth comb, and looking with maternal care among his curls; this I
shall not forget.  Likewise, a picture of a broad, rubicund Judith by
Bardone,--a widow of fifty, of an easy, lymphatic, cheerful temperament,
who has just killed Holofernes, and is as self-complacent as if she had
been carving a goose.  What could possibly have stirred up this pudding
of a woman (unless it were a pudding-stick) to do such a deed!  I looked
with much pleasure at an ugly, old, fat, jolly Bacchus, astride on a
barrel, by Rubens; the most natural and lifelike representation of a
tipsy rotundity of flesh that it is possible to imagine.  And sometimes,
amid these sensual images, I caught the divine pensiveness of a Madonna's
face, by Raphael, or the glory and majesty of the babe Jesus in her arm,
with his Father shining through him.  This is a sort of revelation,
whenever it comes.

This morning, immediately after breakfast, I walked into the city,
meaning to make myself better acquainted with its appearance, and to go
into its various churches; but it soon grew so hot, that I turned
homeward again.  The interior of the Duomo was deliciously cool, to be
sure,--cool and dim, after the white-hot sunshine; but an old woman began
to persecute me, so that I came away.  A male beggar drove me out of
another church; and I took refuge in the street, where the beggar and I
would have been two cinders together, if we had stood long enough on the
sunny sidewalk.  After my five summers' experience of England, I may have
forgotten what hot weather is; but it does appear to me that an American
summer is not so fervent as this.  Besides the direct rays, the white
pavement throws a furnace-heat up into one's face; the shady margin of
the street is barely tolerable; but it is like going through the ordeal
of fire to cross the broad bright glare of an open piazza.  The narrow
streets prove themselves a blessing at this season, except when the sun
looks directly into them; the broad eaves of the houses, too, make a
selvage of shade, almost always.  I do not know what becomes of the
street-merchants at the noontide of these hot days.  They form a numerous
class in Florence, displaying their wares--linen or cotton cloth,
threads, combs, and all manner of haberdashery--on movable counters that
are borne about on wheels.  In the shady morning, you see a whole side of
a street in a piazza occupied by them, all offering their merchandise at
full cry.  They dodge as they can from shade to shade; but at last the
sunshine floods the whole space, and they seem to have melted away,
leaving not a rag of themselves or what they dealt in.

Cherries are very abundant now, and have been so ever since we came here,
in the markets and all about the streets.  They are of various kinds,
some exceedingly large, insomuch that it is almost necessary to disregard
the old proverb about making two bites of a cherry.  Fresh figs are
already spoken of, though I have seen none; but I saw some peaches this
morning, looking as if they might be ripe.


June 16th.--Mr. and Mrs. Powers called to see us last evening.  Mr.
Powers, as usual, was full of talk, and gave utterance to a good many
instructive and entertaining ideas.

As one instance of the little influence the religion of the Italians has
upon their morals, he told a story of one of his servants, who desired
leave to set up a small shrine of the Virgin in their room--a cheap
print, or bas-relief, or image, such as are sold everywhere at the shops
--and to burn a lamp before it; she engaging, of course, to supply the
oil at her own expense.  By and by, her oil-flask appeared to possess a
miraculous property of replenishing itself, and Mr. Powers took measures
to ascertain where the oil came from.  It turned out that the servant had
all the time been stealing the oil from them, and keeping up her daily
sacrifice and worship to the Virgin by this constant theft.

His talk soon turned upon sculpture, and he spoke once more of the
difficulty imposed upon an artist by the necessity of clothing portrait
statues in the modern costume.  I find that he does not approve either of
nudity or of the Roman toga for a modern statue; neither does he think it
right to shirk the difficulty--as Chantrey did in the case of Washington
--by enveloping him in a cloak; but acknowledges the propriety of taking
the actual costume of the age and doing his best with it.  He himself did
so with his own Washington, and also with a statue that he made of Daniel
Webster.  I suggested that though this costume might not appear
ridiculous to us now, yet, two or three centuries hence, it would create,
to the people of that day, an impossibility of seeing the real man
through the absurdity of his envelopment, after it shall have entirely
grown out of fashion and remembrance; and Webster would seem as absurd to
them then as he would to us now in the masquerade of some bygone day.  It
might be well, therefore, to adopt some conventional costume, never
actual, but always graceful and noble.  Besides, Webster, for example,
had other costumes than that which he wore in public, and perhaps it was
in those that he lived his most real life; his dressing-gown, his drapery
of the night, the dress that he wore on his fishing-excursions; in these
other costumes he spent three fourths of his time, and most probably was
thus arrayed when he conceived the great thoughts that afterwards, in
some formal and outside mood, he gave forth to the public.  I scarcely
think I was right, but am not sure of the contrary.  At any rate, I know
that I should have felt much more sure that I knew the real Webster, if I
had seen him in any of the above-mentioned dresses, than either in his
swallow-tailed coat or frock.

Talking of a taste for painting and sculpture, Powers observed that it
was something very different and quite apart from the moral sense, and
that it was often, perhaps generally, possessed by unprincipled men of
ability and cultivation.  I have had this perception myself.  A genuine
love of painting and sculpture, and perhaps of music, seems often to have
distinguished men capable of every social crime, and to have formed a
fine and hard enamel over their characters.  Perhaps it is because such
tastes are artificial, the product of cultivation, and, when highly
developed, imply a great remove from natural simplicity.

This morning I went with U---- to the Uffizi gallery, and again looked
with more or less attention at almost every picture and statue.  I saw a
little picture of the golden age, by Zucchero, in which the charms of
youths and virgins are depicted with a freedom that this iron age can
hardly bear to look at.  The cabinet of gems happened to be open for the
admission of a privileged party, and we likewise went in and saw a
brilliant collection of goldsmiths' work, among which, no doubt, were
specimens from such hands as Benvenuto Cellini.  Little busts with
diamond eyes; boxes of gems; cups carved out of precious material;
crystal vases, beautifully chased and engraved, and sparkling with
jewels; great pearls, in the midst of rubies; opals, rich with all manner
of lovely lights.  I remember Benvenuto Cellini, in his memoirs, speaks
of manufacturing such playthings as these.

I observed another characteristic of the summer streets of Florence
to-day; tables, movable to and fro, on wheels, and set out with cool iced
drinks and cordials.


June 17th.--My wife and I went, this morning, to the Academy of Fine
Arts, and, on our way thither, went into the Duomo, where we found a
deliciously cool twilight, through which shone the mild gleam of the
painted windows.  I cannot but think it a pity that St. Peter's is not
lighted by such windows as these, although I by no means saw the glory in
them now that I have spoken of in a record of my former visit.  We found
out the monument of Giotto, a tablet, and portrait in bas-relief, on the
wall, near the entrance of the cathedral, on the right hand; also a
representation, in fresco, of a knight on horseback, the memorial of one
John Rawkwood, close by the door, to the left.  The priests were chanting
a service of some kind or other in the choir, terribly inharmonious, and
out of tune. . . .

On reaching the Academy, the soldier or policeman at the entrance
directed us into the large hall, the walls of which were covered on both
sides with pictures, arranged as nearly as possible in a progressive
series, with reference to the date of the painters; so that here the
origin and procession of the art may be traced through the course of, at
least, two hundred years.  Giotto, Cimabue, and others of unfamiliar
names to me, are among the earliest; and, except as curiosities, I should
never desire to look once at them, nor think of looking twice.  They seem
to have been executed with great care and conscientiousness, and the
heads are often wrought out with minuteness and fidelity, and have so
much expression that they tell their own story clearly enough; but it
seems not to have been the painter's aim to effect a lifelike illusion,
the background and accessories being conventional.  The trees are no more
like real trees than the feather of a pen, and there is no perspective,
the figure of the picture being shadowed forth on a surface of burnished
gold.  The effect, when these pictures, some of them very large, were new
and freshly gilded, must have been exceedingly brilliant, and much
resembling, on an immensely larger scale, the rich illuminations in an
old monkish missal.  In fact, we have not now, in pictorial ornament,
anything at all comparable to what their splendor must have been.  I was
most struck with a picture, by Fabriana Gentile, of the Adoration of the
Magi, where the faces and figures have a great deal of life and action,
and even grace, and where the jewelled crowns, the rich embroidered
robes, and cloth of gold, and all the magnificence of the three kings,
are represented with the vividness of the real thing: a gold sword-hilt,
for instance, or a pair of gold spurs, being actually embossed on the
picture.  The effect is very powerful, and though produced in what modern
painters would pronounce an unjustifiable way, there is yet pictorial art
enough to reconcile it to the spectator's mind.  Certainly, the people of
the Middle Ages knew better than ourselves what is magnificence, and how
to produce it; and what a glorious work must that have been, both in its
mere sheen of burnished gold, and in its illuminating art, which shines
thus through the gloom of perhaps four centuries.

Fra Angelico is a man much admired by those who have a taste for
Pre-Raphaelite painters; and, though I take little or no pleasure in his
works, I can see that there is great delicacy of execution in his heads,
and that generally he produces such a Christ, and such a Virgin, and such
saints, as he could not have foreseen, except in a pure and holy
imagination, nor have wrought out without saying a prayer between every
two touches of his brush.  I might come to like him, in time, if I
thought it worth while; but it is enough to have an outside perception of
his kind and degree of merit, and so to let him pass into the garret of
oblivion, where many things as good, or better, are piled away, that our
own age may not stumble over them.  Perugino is the first painter whose
works seem really worth preserving for the genuine merit that is in them,
apart from any quaintness and curiosity of an ancient and new-born art.
Probably his religion was more genuine than Raphael's, and therefore the
Virgin often revealed herself to him in a loftier and sweeter face of
divine womanhood than all the genius of Raphael could produce.  There is
a Crucifixion by him in this gallery, which made me partly feel as if I
were a far-off spectator,--no, I did not mean a Crucifixion, but a
picture of Christ dead, lying, with a calm, sweet face, on his mother's
knees ["a Pieta"].

The most inadequate and utterly absurd picture here, or in any other
gallery, is a head of the Eternal Father, by Carlo Dolce; it looks like a
feeble saint, on the eve of martyrdom, and very doubtful how he shall be
able to bear it; very finely and prettily painted, nevertheless.

After getting through the principal gallery we went into a smaller room,
in which are contained a great many small specimens of the old Tuscan
artists, among whom Fra Angelico makes the principal figure.  These
pictures are all on wood, and seem to have been taken from the shrines
and altars of ancient churches; they are predellas and triptychs, or
pictures on three folding tablets, shaped quaintly, in Gothic peaks or
arches, and still gleaming with backgrounds of antique gold.  The wood is
much worm-eaten, and the colors have often faded or changed from what the
old artists meant then to be; a bright angel darkening into what looks
quite as much like the Devil.  In one of Fra Angelico's pictures,--a
representation of the Last Judgment,--he has tried his saintly hand at
making devils indeed, and showing them busily at work, tormenting the
poor, damned souls in fifty ghastly ways.  Above sits Jesus, with the
throng of blessed saints around him, and a flow of tender and powerful
love in his own face, that ought to suffice to redeem all the damned, and
convert the very fiends, and quench the fires of hell.  At any rate, Fra
Angelico had a higher conception of his Saviour than Michael Angelo.


June 19th.--This forenoon we have been to the Church of St. Lorenzo,
which stands on the site of an ancient basilica, and was itself built
more than four centuries ago.  The facade is still an ugly height of
rough brickwork, as is the case with the Duomo, and, I think, some other
churches in Florence; the design of giving them an elaborate and
beautiful finish having been delayed from cycle to cycle, till at length
the day for spending mines of wealth on churches is gone by.  The
interior had a nave with a flat roof, divided from the side aisles by
Corinthian pillars, and, at the farther end, a raised space around the
high altar.  The pavement is a mosaic of squares of black and white
marble, the squares meeting one another cornerwise; the pillars,
pilasters, and other architectural material is dark brown or grayish
stone; and the general effect is very sombre, especially as the church is
somewhat dimly lighted, and as the shrines along the aisles, and the
statues, and the monuments of whatever kind, look dingy with time and
neglect.  The nave is thickly set with wooden seats, brown and worn.
What pictures there are, in the shrines and chapels, are dark and faded.
On the whole, the edifice has a shabby aspect.  On each side of the high
altar, elevated on four pillars of beautiful marble, is what looks like a
great sarcophagus of bronze.  They are, in fact, pulpits, and are
ornamented with mediaeval bas-reliefs, representing scenes in the life of
our Saviour.  Murray says that the resting-place of the first Cosmo de'
Medici, the old banker, who so managed his wealth as to get the
posthumous title of "father of his country," and to make his posterity
its reigning princes,--is in front of the high altar, marked by red and
green porphyry and marble, inlaid into the pavement.  We looked, but
could not see it there.

There were worshippers at some of the shrines, and persons sitting here
and there along the nave, and in the aisles, rapt in devotional thought,
doubtless, and sheltering themselves here from the white sunshine of the
piazzas.  In the vicinity of the choir and the high altar, workmen were
busy repairing the church, or perhaps only making arrangements for
celebrating the great festival of St. John.

On the left hand of the choir is what is called the old sacristy, with
the peculiarities or notabilities of which I am not acquainted.  On the
right hand is the new sacristy, otherwise called the Capella dei
Depositi, or Chapel of the Buried, built by Michael Angelo, to contain
two monuments of the Medici family.  The interior is of somewhat severe
and classic architecture, the walls and pilasters being of dark stone,
and surmounted by a dome, beneath which is a row of windows, quite round
the building, throwing their light down far beneath, upon niches of white
marble.  These niches are ranged entirely around the chapel, and might
have sufficed to contain more than all the Medici monuments that the
world would ever care to have.  Only two of these niches are filled,
however.  In one of them sits Giuliano de' Medici, sculptured by Michael
Angelo,--a figure of dignity, which would perhaps be very striking in any
other presence than that of the statue which occupies the corresponding
niche.  At the feet of Giuliano recline two allegorical statues, Day and
Night, whose meaning there I do not know, and perhaps Michael Angelo knew
as little.  As the great sculptor's statues are apt to do, they fling
their limbs abroad with adventurous freedom.  Below the corresponding
niche, on the opposite side of the chapel, recline two similar statues,
representing Morning and Evening, sufficiently like Day and Night to be
their brother and sister; all, in truth, having sprung from the same
father. . . .

But the statue that sits above these two latter allegories, Morning and
Evening, is like no other that ever came from a sculptor's hand.  It is
the one work worthy of Michael Angelo's reputation, and grand enough to
vindicate for him all the genius that the world gave him credit for.  And
yet it seems a simple thing enough to think of or to execute; merely a
sitting figure, the face partly overshadowed by a helmet, one hand
supporting the chin, the other resting on the thigh.  But after looking
at it a little while the spectator ceases to think of it as a marble
statue; it comes to life, and you see that the princely figure is
brooding over some great design, which, when he has arranged in his own
mind, the world will be fain to execute for him.  No such grandeur and
majesty has elsewhere been put into human shape.  It is all a miracle;
the deep repose, and the deep life within it.  It is as much a miracle to
have achieved this as to make a statue that would rise up and walk.  The
face, when one gazes earnestly into it, beneath the shadow of its helmet,
is seen to be calmly sombre; a mood which, I think, is generally that of
the rulers of mankind, except in moments of vivid action.  This statue is
one of the things which I look at with highest enjoyment, but also with
grief and impatience, because I feel that I do not come at all which it
involves, and that by and by I must go away and leave it forever.  How
wonderful!  To take a block of marble, and convert it wholly into
thought, and to do it through all the obstructions and impediments of
drapery; for there is nothing nude in this statue but the face and hands.
The vest is the costume of Michael Angelo's century.  This is what I
always thought a sculptor of true genius should be able to do,--to show
the man of whatever epoch, nobly and heroically, through the costume
which he might actually have worn.

The statue sits within a square niche of white marble, and completely
fills it.  It seems to me a pity that it should be thus confined.  At the
Crystal Palace, if I remember, the effect is improved by a free
surrounding space.  Its naturalness is as if it came out of the marble of
its own accord, with all its grandeur hanging heavily about it, and sat
down there beneath its weight.  I cannot describe it.  It is like trying
to stop the ghost of Hamlet's father, by crossing spears before it.

Communicating with the sacristy is the Medicean Chapel, which was built
more than two centuries ago, for the reception of the Holy Sepulchre;
arrangements having been made about that time to steal this most sacred
relic from the Turks.  The design failing, the chapel was converted by
Cosmo II. into a place of sepulture for the princes of his family.  It is
a very grand and solemn edifice, octagonal in shape, with a lofty dome,
within which is a series of brilliant frescos, painted not more than
thirty years ago.  These pictures are the only portion of the adornment
of the chapel which interferes with the sombre beauty of the general
effect; for though the walls are incrusted, from pavement to dome, with
marbles of inestimable cost, and it is a Florentine mosaic on a grander
scale than was ever executed elsewhere, the result is not gaudy, as in
many of the Roman chapels, but a dark and melancholy richness.  The
architecture strikes me as extremely fine; each alternate side of the
octagon being an arch, rising as high as the cornice of the lofty dome,
and forming the frame of a vast niche.  All the dead princes, no doubt,
according to the general design, were to have been honored with statues
within this stately mausoleum; but only two--those of Ferdinand I. and
Cosmo II.--seem to have been placed here.  They were a bad breed, and few
of them deserved any better monument than a dunghill; and yet they have
this grand chapel for the family at large, and yonder grand statue for
one of its most worthless members.  I am glad of it; and as for the
statue, Michael Angelo wrought it through the efficacy of a kingly idea,
which had no reference to the individual whose name it bears.

In the piazza adjoining the church is a statue of the first Cosmo, the
old banker, in Roman costume, seated, and looking like a man fit to hold
authority.  No, I mistake; the statue is of John de' Medici, the father
of Cosmo, and himself no banker, but a soldier.


June 21st.--Yesterday, after dinner, we went, with the two eldest
children, to the Boboli Gardens. . . . We entered by a gate, nearer to
our house than that by the Pitti Palace, and found ourselves almost
immediately among embowered walks of box and shrubbery, and little
wildernesses of trees, with here and there a seat under an arbor, and a
marble statue, gray with ancient weather-stains.  The site of the garden
is a very uneven surface, and the paths go upward and downward, and
ascend, at their ultimate point, to a base of what appears to be a
fortress, commanding the city.  A good many of the Florentines were
rambling about the gardens, like ourselves: little parties of
school-boys; fathers and mothers, with their youthful progeny; young men
in couples, looking closely into every female face; lovers, with a maid
or two attendant on the young lady.  All appeared to enjoy themselves,
especially the children, dancing on the esplanades, or rolling down the
slopes of the hills; and the loving pairs, whom it was rather
embarrassing to come upon unexpectedly, sitting together on the stone
seat of an arbor, with clasped hands, a passionate solemnity in the young
man's face, and a downcast pleasure in the lady's.  Policemen, in cocked
hats and epaulets, cross-belts, and swords, were scattered about the
grounds, but interfered with nobody, though they seemed to keep an eye on
all.  A sentinel stood in the hot sunshine, looking down over the garden
from the ramparts of the fortress.

For my part, in this foreign country, I have no objection to policemen or
any other minister of authority; though I remember, in America, I had an
innate antipathy to constables, and always sided with the mob against
law.  This was very wrong and foolish, considering that I was one of
the sovereigns; but a sovereign, or any number of sovereigns, or the
twenty-millionth part of a sovereign, does not love to find himself, as
an American must, included within the delegated authority of his own
servants.

There is a sheet of water somewhere in the Boboli Gardens, inhabited by
swans; but this we did not see.  We found a smaller pond, however, set
in marble, and surrounded by a parapet, and alive with a multitude of
fish.  There were minnows by the thousand, and a good many gold-fish; and
J-----, who had brought some bread to feed the swans, threw in handfuls
of crumbs for the benefit of these finny people.  They seemed to be
accustomed to such courtesies on the part of visitors; and immediately
the surface of the water was blackened, at the spot where each crumb
fell, with shoals of minnows, thrusting one another even above the
surface in their eagerness to snatch it.  Within the depths of the pond,
the yellowish-green water--its hue being precisely that of the Arno--
would be reddened duskily with the larger bulk of two or three
gold-fishes, who finally poked their great snouts up among the minnows,
but generally missed the crumb.  Beneath the circular margin of the pond,
there are little arches, into the shelter of which the fish retire, when
the noonday sun burns straight down into their dark waters.  We went on
through the garden-paths, shadowed quite across by the high walls of box,
and reached an esplanade, whence we had a good view of Florence, with the
bare brown ridges on the northern side of the Arno, and glimpses of the
river itself, flowing like a street, between two rows of palaces.  A
great way off, too, we saw some of the cloud-like peaks of the Apennines,
and, above them, the clouds into which the sun was descending, looking
quite as substantial as the distant mountains.  The city did not present
a particularly splendid aspect, though its great Duomo was seen in the
middle distance, sitting in its circle of little domes, with the tall
campanile close by, and within one or two hundred yards of it, the high,
cumbrous bulk of the Palazzo Vecchio, with its lofty, machicolated, and
battlemented tower, very picturesque, yet looking exceedingly like a
martin-box, on a pole.  There were other domes and towers and spires, and
here and there the distinct shape of an edifice; but the general picture
was of a contiguity of red earthen roofs, filling a not very broad or
extensive valley, among dry and ridgy hills, with a river-gleam
lightening up the landscape a little.  U---- took out her pencil and
tablets, and began to sketch the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio; in doing
which, she immediately became an object of curiosity to some little boys
and larger people, who failed not, under such pretences as taking a
grasshopper off her dress, or no pretence at all, to come and look over
her shoulder.  There is a kind of familiarity among these Florentines,
which is not meant to be discourteous, and ought to be taken in good
part.

We continued to ramble through the gardens, in quest of a good spot from
which to see the sunset, and at length found a stone bench, on the slope
of a hill, whence the entire cloud and sun scenery was fully presented to
us.  At the foot of the hill were statues, and among them a Pegasus, with
wings outspread; and, a little beyond, the garden-front of the Pitti
Palace, which looks a little less like a state-prison here, than as it
fronts the street.  Girls and children, and young men and old, were
taking their pleasure in our neighborhood; and, just before us, a lady
stood talking with her maid.  By and by, we discovered her to be Miss
Howorth.  There was a misty light, streaming down on the hither side of
the ridge of hills, that was rather peculiar; but the most remarkable
thing was the shape into which the clouds gathered themselves, after the
disappearance of the sun.  It was like a tree, with a broad and heavy
mass of foliage, spreading high upward on the sky, and a dark and
well-defined trunk, which rooted itself on the verge of the horizon.

This morning we went to the Pitti Palace.  The air was very sultry, and
the pavements, already heated with the sun, made the space between the
buildings seem like a close room.  The earth, I think, is too much stoned
out of the streets of an Italian city,--paved, like those of Florence,
quite across, with broad flagstones, to the line where the stones of the
houses on each side are piled up.  Thunder rumbled over our heads,
however, and the clouds were so dark that we scarcely hoped to reach the
palace without feeling the first drops of the shower.  The air still
darkened and darkened, so that by the time we arrived at the suite of
picture-rooms the pictures seemed all to be changed to Rembrandts; the
shadows as black as midnight, with only some highly illuminated portions
gleaming out.  The obscurity of the atmosphere made us sensible how
splendid is the adornment of these saloons.  For the gilded cornices
shone out, as did the gilding of the arches and wreathed circles that
divide the ceiling into compartments, within which the frescos are
painted, and whence the figures looked dimly down, like gods out of a
mysterious sky.  The white marble sculptures also gleamed from their
height, where winged cupids or cherubs gambolled aloft in bas-reliefs; or
allegoric shapes reclined along the cornices, hardly noticed, when the
daylight comes brightly into the window.  On the walls, all the rich
picture-frames glimmered in gold, as did the framework of the chairs, and
the heavy gilded pedestals of the marble, alabaster, and mosaic tables.
These are very magnificent saloons; and since I have begun to speak of
their splendor, I may as well add that the doors are framed in polished,
richly veined marble, and the walls hung with scarlet damask.

It was useless to try to see the pictures.  All the artists engaged in
copying laid aside their brushes; and we looked out into the square
before the palace, where a mighty wind sprang up, and quickly raised a
prodigious cloud of dust.  It hid the opposite side of the street, and
was carried, in a great dusky whirl, higher than the roofs of the houses,
higher than the top of the Pitti Palace itself.  The thunder muttered and
grumbled, the lightning now and then flashed, and a few rain-drops
pattered against the windows; but, for a long time, the shower held off.
At last it came down in a stream, and lightened the air to such a degree
that we could see some of the pictures, especially those of Rubens, and
the illuminated parts of Salvator Rosa's, and, best of all, Titian's
"Magdalen," the one with golden hair clustering round her naked body.
The golden hair, indeed, seemed to throw out a glory of its own.  This
Magdalen is very coarse and sensual, with only an impudent assumption of
penitence and religious sentiment, scarcely so deep as the eyelids; but
it is a splendid picture, nevertheless, with those naked, lifelike arms,
and the hands that press the rich locks about her, and so carefully
permit those voluptuous breasts to be seen.  She a penitent!  She would
shake off all pretence to it as easily as she would shake aside that
clustering hair. . . . Titian must have been a very good-for-nothing
old man.

I looked again at Michael Angelo's Fates to-day; but cannot
satisfactorily make out what he meant by them.  One of them--she who
holds the distaff--has her mouth open, as if uttering a cry, and might be
fancied to look somewhat irate.  The second, who holds the thread, has a
pensive air, but is still, I think, pitiless at heart.  The third sister
looks closely and coldly into the eyes of the second, meanwhile cutting
the thread with a pair of shears.  Michael Angelo, if I may presume to
say so, wished to vary the expression of these three sisters, and give
each a different one, but did not see precisely how, inasmuch as all the
fatal Three are united, heart and soul, in one purpose.  It is a very
impressive group.  But, as regards the interpretation of this, or of any
other profound picture, there are likely to be as many interpretations as
there are spectators.  It is very curious to read criticisms upon
pictures, and upon the same face in a picture, and by men of taste and
feeling, and to find what different conclusions they arrive at.  Each man
interprets the hieroglyphic in his own way; and the painter, perhaps, had
a meaning which none of them have reached; or possibly he put forth a
riddle, without himself knowing the solution.  There is such a necessity,
at all events, of helping the painter out with the spectator's own
resources of feeling and imagination, that you can never be sure how much
of the picture you have yourself made.  There is no doubt that the public
is, to a certain extent, right and sure of its ground, when it declares,
through a series of ages, that a certain picture is a great work.  It is
so; a great symbol, proceeding out of a great mind; but if it means one
thing, it seems to mean a thousand, and, often, opposite things.


June 27th.--I have had a heavy cold and fever almost throughout the past
week, and have thereby lost the great Florentine festivity, the Feast of
St. John, which took place on Thursday last, with the fireworks and
illuminations the evening before, and the races and court ceremonies on
the day itself.  However, unless it were more characteristic and peculiar
than the Carnival, I have not missed anything very valuable.

Mr. Powers called to see me one evening, and poured out, as usual, a
stream of talk, both racy and oracular in its character.  Speaking of
human eyes, he observed that they did not depend for their expression
upon color, nor upon any light of the soul beaming through them, nor any
glow of the eyeball, nor upon anything but the form and action of the
surrounding muscles.  He illustrates it by saying, that if the eye of a
wolf, or of whatever fiercest animal, could be placed in another setting,
it would be found capable of the utmost gentleness of expression.  "You
yourself," said he, "have a very bright and sharp look sometimes; but it
is not in the eye itself."  His own eyes, as I could have sworn, were
glowing all the time he spoke; and, remembering how many times I have
seemed to see eyes glow, and blaze, and flash, and sparkle, and melt, and
soften; and how all poetry is illuminated with the light of ladies' eyes;
and how many people have been smitten by the lightning of an eye, whether
in love or anger, it was difficult to allow that all this subtlest and
keenest fire is illusive, not even phosphorescent, and that any other
jelly in the same socket would serve as well as the brightest eye.
Nevertheless, he must be right; of course he must, and I am rather
ashamed ever to have thought otherwise.  Where should the light come
from?  Has a man a flame inside of his head?  Does his spirit manifest
itself in the semblance of flame?  The moment we think of it, the
absurdity becomes evident.  I am not quite sure, however, that the outer
surface of the eye may not reflect more light in some states of feeling
than in others; the state of the health, certainly, has an influence of
this kind.

I asked Powers what he thought of Michael Angelo's statue of Lorenzo de'
Medici.  He allowed that its effect was very grand and mysterious; but
added that it owed this to a trick,--the effect being produced by the
arrangement of the hood, as he called it, or helmet, which throws the
upper part of the face into shadow.  The niche in which it sits has, I
suppose, its part to perform in throwing a still deeper shadow.  It is
very possible that Michael Angelo may have calculated upon this effect of
sombre shadow, and legitimately, I think; but it really is not worthy of
Mr. Powers to say that the whole effect of this mighty statue depends,
not on the positive efforts of Michael Angelo's chisel, but on the
absence of light in a space of a few inches.  He wrought the whole statue
in harmony with that small part of it which he leaves to the spectator's
imagination, and if he had erred at any point, the miracle would have
been a failure; so that, working in marble, he has positively reached a
degree of excellence above the capability of marble, sculpturing his
highest touches upon air and duskiness.

Mr. Powers gave some amusing anecdotes of his early life, when he was a
clerk in a store in Cincinnati.  There was a museum opposite, the
proprietor of which had a peculiar physiognomy that struck Powers,
insomuch that he felt impelled to make continual caricatures of it.  He
used to draw them upon the door of the museum, and became so familiar
with the face, that he could draw them in the dark; so that, every
morning, here was this absurd profile of himself, greeting the museum-man
when he came to open his establishment.  Often, too, it would reappear
within an hour after it was rubbed out.  The man was infinitely annoyed,
and made all possible efforts to discover the unknown artist, but in
vain; and finally concluded, I suppose, that the likeness broke out upon
the door of its own accord, like the nettle-rash.  Some years afterwards,
the proprietor of the museum engaged Powers himself as an assistant; and
one day Powers asked him if he remembered this mysterious profile.
"Yes," said he, "did you know who drew them?"  Powers took a piece of
chalk, and touched off the very profile again, before the man's eyes.
"Ah," said he, "if I had known it at the time, I would have broken every
bone in your body!"

Before he began to work in marble, Powers had greater practice and
success in making wax figures, and he produced a work of this kind called
"The Infernal Regions," which he seemed to imply had been very famous.
He said he once wrought a face in wax which was life itself, having made
the eyes on purpose for it, and put in every hair in the eyebrows
individually, and finished the whole with similar minuteness; so that,
within the distance of a foot or two, it was impossible to tell that the
face did not live.

I have hardly ever before felt an impulse to write down a man's
conversation as I do that of Mr. Powers.  The chief reason is, probably,
that it is so possible to do it, his ideas being square, solid, and
tangible, and therefore readily grasped and retained.  He is a very
instructive man, and sweeps one's empty and dead notions out of the way
with exceeding vigor; but when you have his ultimate thought and
perception, you feel inclined to think and see a little further for
yourself.  He sees too clearly what is within his range to be aware of
any region of mystery beyond.  Probably, however, this latter remark does
him injustice.  I like the man, and am always glad to encounter the
mill-stream of his talk. . . . Yesterday he met me in the street
(dressed in his linen blouse and slippers, with a little bit of a
sculptor's cap on the side of his head), and gave utterance to a theory
of colds, and a dissertation on the bad effects of draughts, whether of
cold air or hot, and the dangers of transfusing blood from the veins of
one living subject to those of another.  On the last topic, he remarked
that, if a single particle of air found its way into the veins, along
with the transfused blood, it caused convulsions and inevitable death;
otherwise the process might be of excellent effect.

Last evening, we went to pass the evening with Miss Blagden, who inhabits
a villa at Bellosguardo, about a mile outside of the walls.  The
situation is very lofty, and there are good views from every window of
the house, and an especially fine one of Florence and the hills beyond,
from the balcony of the drawing-room.  By and by came Mr. Browning, Mr.
Trollope, Mr. Boott and his young daughter, and two or three other
gentlemen. . . .

Browning was very genial and full of life, as usual, but his conversation
has the effervescent aroma which you cannot catch, even if you get the
very words that seem to be imbued with it.  He spoke most rapturously of
a portrait of Mrs. Browning, which an Italian artist is painting for the
wife of an American gentleman, as a present from her husband.  The
success was already perfect, although there had been only two sittings as
yet, and both on the same day; and in this relation, Mr. Browning
remarked that P------, the American artist, had had no less than
seventy-three sittings of him for a portrait.  In the result, every hair
and speck of him was represented; yet, as I inferred from what he did not
say, this accumulation of minute truths did not, after all, amount to the
true whole.

I do not remember much else that Browning said, except a playful abuse of
a little King Charles spaniel, named Frolic, Miss Blagden's lap-dog,
whose venerable age (he is eleven years old) ought to have pleaded in his
behalf.  Browning's nonsense is of very genuine and excellent quality,
the true babble and effervescence of a bright and powerful mind; and he
lets it play among his friends with the faith and simplicity of a child.
He must be an amiable man.  I should like him much, and should make him
like me, if opportunities were favorable.

I conversed principally with Mr. Trollope, the son, I believe, of the
Mrs. Trollope to whom America owes more for her shrewd criticisms than we
are ever likely to repay.  Mr. Trollope is a very sensible and cultivated
man, and, I suspect, an author: at least, there is a literary man of
repute of this name, though I have never read his works.  He has resided
in Italy eighteen years.  It seems a pity to do this.  It needs the
native air to give life a reality; a truth which I do not fail to take
home regretfully to myself, though without feeling much inclination to go
back to the realities of my own.

We had a pleasant cup of tea, and took a moonlight view of Florence from
the balcony. . . .


June 28th.--Yesterday afternoon, J----- and I went to a horse-race, which
took place in the Corso and contiguous line of streets, in further
celebration of the Feast of St. John.  A crowd of people was already
collected, all along the line of the proposed race, as early as six
o'clock; and there were a great many carriages driving amid the throng,
open barouches mostly, in which the beauty and gentility of Florence were
freely displayed.  It was a repetition of the scene in the Corso at Rome,
at Carnival time, without the masks, the fun, and the confetti.  The
Grand Duke and Duchess and the Court likewise made their appearance in as
many as seven or eight coaches-and-six, each with a coachman, three
footmen, and a postilion in the royal livery, and attended by a troop of
horsemen in scarlet coats and cocked hats.  I did not particularly notice
the Grand Duke himself; but, in the carriage behind him, there sat only a
lady, who favored the people along the street with a constant succession
of bows, repeated at such short intervals, and so quickly, as to be
little more than nods; therefore not particularly graceful or majestic.
Having the good fortune, to be favored with one of these nods, I lifted
my hat in response, and may therefore claim a bowing acquaintance with
the Grand Duchess.  She is a Bourbon of the Naples family, and was a
pale, handsome woman, of princely aspect enough.  The crowd evinced no
enthusiasm, nor the slightest feeling of any kind, in acknowledgment of
the presence of their rulers; and, indeed, I think I never saw a crowd so
well behaved; that is, with so few salient points, so little ebullition,
so absolutely tame, as the Florentine one.  After all, and much contrary
to my expectations, an American crowd has incomparably more life than any
other; and, meeting on any casual occasion, it will talk, laugh, roar,
and be diversified with a thousand characteristic incidents and gleams
and shadows, that you see nothing of here.  The people seems to have no
part even in its own gatherings.  It comes together merely as a mass of
spectators, and must not so much as amuse itself by any activity of mind.

The race, which was the attraction that drew us all together, turned out
a very pitiful affair.  When we had waited till nearly dusk, the street
being thronged quite across, insomuch that it seemed impossible that it
should be cleared as a race-course, there came suddenly from every throat
a quick, sharp exclamation, combining into a general shout.  Immediately
the crowd pressed back on each side of the street; a moment afterwards,
there was a rapid pattering of hoofs over the earth with which the
pavement was strewn, and I saw the head and back of a horse rushing past.
A few seconds more, and another horse followed; and at another little
interval, a third.  This was all that we had waited for; all that I saw,
or anybody else, except those who stood on the utmost verge of the
course, at the risk of being trampled down and killed.  Two men were
killed in this way on Thursday, and certainly human life was never spent
for a poorer object.  The spectators at the windows, to be sure, having
the horses in sight for a longer time, might get a little more enjoyment
out of the affair.  By the by, the most picturesque aspect of the scene
was the life given to it by the many faces, some of them fair ones, that
looked out from window and balcony, all along the curving line of lofty
palaces and edifices, between which the race-course lay; and from nearly
every window, and over every balcony, was flung a silken texture, or
cloth of brilliant line, or piece of tapestry or carpet, or whatever
adornment of the kind could be had, so as to dress up the street in gala
attire.  But, the Feast of St. John, like the Carnival, is but a meagre
semblance of festivity, kept alive factitiously, and dying a lingering
death of centuries.  It takes the exuberant mind and heart of a people to
keep its holidays alive.

I do not know whether there be any populace in Florence, but I saw none
that I recognized as such, on this occasion.  All the people were
respectably dressed and perfectly well behaved; and soldiers and priests
were scattered abundantly among the throng.  On my way home, I saw the
Teatro Goldoni, which is in our own street, lighted up for a
representation this Sunday evening.  It shocked my New England prejudices
a little.

Thus forenoon, my wife and I went to the Church of Santa Croce, the great
monumental deposit of Florentine worthies.  The piazza before it is a
wide, gravelled square, where the liberty of Florence, if it really ever
had any genuine liberty, came into existence some hundreds of years ago,
by the people's taking its own rights into its hands, and putting its own
immediate will in execution.  The piazza has not much appearance of
antiquity, except that the facade of one of the houses is quite covered
with ancient frescos, a good deal faded and obliterated, yet with traces
enough of old glory to show that the colors must have been well laid on.

The front of the church, the foundation of which was laid six centuries
ago, is still waiting for its casing of marbles, and I suppose will wait
forever, though a carpenter's staging is now erected before it, as if
with the purpose of doing something.

The interior is spacious, the length of the church being between four and
five hundred feet.  There is a nave, roofed with wooden cross-beams,
lighted by a clere-story and supported on each side by seven great
pointed arches, which rest upon octagonal pillars.  The octagon seems to
be a favorite shape in Florence.  These pillars were clad in yellow and
scarlet damask, in honor of the Feast of St. John.  The aisles, on each
side of the nave, are lighted with high and somewhat narrow windows of
painted glass, the effect of which, however, is much diminished by the
flood of common daylight that comes in through the windows of the
clere-story.  It is like admitting too much of the light of reason and
worldly intelligence into the mind, instead of illuminating it wholly
through a religious medium.  The many-hued saints and angels lose their
mysterious effulgence, when we get white light enough, and find we see
all the better without their help.

The main pavement of the church is brickwork; but it is inlaid with many
sepulchral slabs of marble, on some of which knightly or priestly figures
are sculptured in bas-relief.  In both of the side aisles there are
saintly shrines, alternating with mural monuments, some of which record
names as illustrious as any in the world.  As you enter, the first
monument, on your right is that of Michael Angelo, occupying the ancient
burial-site of his family.  The general design is a heavy sarcophagus of
colored marble, with the figures of Sculpture, Painting, and Architecture
as mourners, and Michael Angelo's bust above, the whole assuming a
pyramidal form.  You pass a shrine, within its framework of marble
pillars and a pediment, and come next to Dante's monument, a modern work,
with likewise its sarcophagus, and some huge, cold images weeping and
sprawling over it, and an unimpressive statue of Dante sitting above.

Another shrine intervenes, and next you see the tomb of Alfieri, erected
to his memory by the Countess of Albany, who pays, out of a woman's love,
the honor which his country owed him.  Her own monument is in one of the
chapels of the transept.

Passing the next shrine you see the tomb of Macchiavelli, which, I think,
was constructed not many years after his death.  The rest of the
monuments, on this side of the church, commemorate people of less than
world-wide fame; and though the opposite side has likewise a monument
alternating with each shrine, I remember only the names of Raphael
Morghen and of Galileo.  The tomb of the latter is over against that of
Michael Angelo, being the first large tomb on the left-hand wall as you
enter the church.  It has the usual heavy sarcophagus, surmounted by a
bust of Galileo, in the habit of his time, and is, of course, duly
provided with mourners in the shape of Science or Astronomy, or some such
cold-hearted people.  I wish every sculptor might be at once imprisoned
for life who shall hereafter chisel an allegoric figure; and as for those
who have sculptured them heretofore, let them be kept in purgatory till
the marble shall have crumbled away.  It is especially absurd to assign
to this frozen sisterhood of the allegoric family the office of weeping
for the dead, inasmuch as they have incomparably less feeling than a lump
of ice, which might contrive to shed a tear if the sun shone on it.  But
they seem to let themselves out, like the hired mourners of an English
funeral, for the very reason that, having no interest in the dead person,
nor any affections or emotions whatever, it costs them no wear and tear
of heart.

All round both transepts of the church there is a series of chapels, into
most of which we went, and generally found an inscrutably dark picture
over the altar, and often a marble bust or two, or perhaps a mediaeval
statue of a saint or a modern monumental bas-relief in marble, as white
as new-fallen snow.  A chapel of the Bonapartes is here, containing
memorials of two female members of the family.  In several chapels,
moreover, there were some of those distressing frescos, by Giotto,
Cimabue, or their compeers, which, whenever I see them,--poor, faded
relics, looking as if the Devil had been rubbing and scrubbing them for
centuries, in spite against the saints,--my heart sinks and my stomach
sickens.  There is no other despondency like this; it is a new shade of
human misery, akin to the physical disease that comes from dryrot in a
wall.  These frescos are to a church what dreary, old remembrances are to
a mind; the drearier because they were once bright: Hope fading into
Disappointment, Joy into Grief, and festal splendor passing into funereal
duskiness, and saddening you all the more by the grim identity that you
find to exist between gay things and sorrowful ones.  Only wait long
enough, and they turn out to be the very same.

All the time we were in the church some great religious ceremony had been
going forward; the organ playing and the white-robed priests bowing,
gesticulating, and making Latin prayers at the high altar, where at least
a hundred wax tapers were burning in constellations.  Everybody knelt,
except ourselves, yet seemed not to be troubled by the echoes of our
passing footsteps, nor to require that we should pray along with them.
They consider us already lost irrevocably, no doubt, and therefore right
enough in taking no heed of their devotions; not but what we took so much
heed, however, as to give the smallest possible disturbance.  By and by
we sat down in the nave of the church till the ceremony should be
concluded; and then my wife left me to go in quest of yet another chapel,
where either Cimabue or Giotto, or both, have left some of their now
ghastly decorations.  While she was gone I threw my eyes about the
church, and came to the conclusion that, in spite of its antiquity, its
size, its architecture, its painted windows, its tombs of great men, and
all the reverence and interest that broods over them, it is not an
impressive edifice.  Any little Norman church in England would impress me
as much, and more.  There is something, I do not know what, but it is in
the region of the heart, rather than in the intellect, that Italian
architecture, of whatever age or style, never seems to reach.

Leaving the Santa Croce, we went next in quest of the Riccardi Palace.
On our way, in the rear of the Grand Ducal Piazza, we passed by the
Bargello, formerly the palace of the Podesta of Florence, and now
converted into a prison.  It is an immense square edifice of dark stone,
with a tall, lank tower rising high above it at one corner.  Two stone
lions, symbols of the city, lash their tails and glare at the passers-by;
and all over the front of the building windows are scattered irregularly,
and grated with rusty iron bars; also there are many square holes, which
probably admit a little light and a breath or two of air into prisoners'
cells.  It is a very ugly edifice, but looks antique, and as if a vast
deal of history might have been transacted within it, or have beaten,
like fierce blasts, against its dark, massive walls, since the thirteenth
century.  When I first saw the city it struck me that there were few
marks of antiquity in Florence; but I am now inclined to think otherwise,
although the bright Italian atmosphere, and the general squareness and
monotony of the Italian architecture, have their effect in apparently
modernizing everything.  But everywhere we see the ponderous Tuscan
basements that never can decay, and which will look, five hundred years
hence, as they look now; and one often passes beneath an abbreviated
remnant of what was once a lofty tower, perhaps three hundred feet high,
such as used to be numerous in Florence when each noble of the city had
his own warfare to wage; and there are patches of sculpture that look old
on houses, the modern stucco of which causes them to look almost new.
Here and there an unmistakable antiquity stands in its own impressive
shadow; the Church of Or San Michele, for instance, once a market, but
which grew to be a church by some inherent fitness and inevitable
consecration.  It has not the least the aspect of a church, being high
and square, like a mediaeval palace; but deep and high niches are let
into its walls, within which stand great statues of saints, masterpieces
of Donatello, and other sculptors of that age, before sculpture began to
be congealed by the influence of Greek art.

The Riccardi Palace is at the corner of the Via Larga.  It was built by
the first Cosmo de' Medici, the old banker, more than four centuries ago,
and was long the home of the ignoble race of princes which he left behind
him.  It looks fit to be still the home of a princely race, being nowise
dilapidated nor decayed externally, nor likely to be so, its high Tuscan
basement being as solid as a ledge of rock, and its upper portion not
much less so, though smoothed into another order of stately architecture.
Entering its court from the Via Larga, we found ourselves beneath a
pillared arcade, passing round the court like a cloister; and on the
walls of the palace, under this succession of arches, were statues,
bas-reliefs, and sarcophagi, in which, first, dead Pagans had slept, and
then dead Christians, before the sculptured coffins were brought hither
to adorn the palace of the Medici.  In the most prominent place was a
Latin inscription of great length and breadth, chiefly in praise of old
Cosino and his deeds and wisdom.  This mansion gives the visitor a
stately notion of the life of a commercial man in the days when merchants
were princes; not that it seems to be so wonderfully extensive, nor so
very grand, for I suppose there are a dozen Roman palaces that excel it
in both these particulars.  Still, we cannot but be conscious that it
must have been, in some sense, a great man who thought of founding a
homestead like this, and was capable of filling it with his personality,
as the hand fills a glove.  It has been found spacious enough, since
Cosmo's time, for an emperor and a pope and a king, all of whom have been
guests in this house.  After being the family mansion of the Medici for
nearly two centuries, it was sold to the Riccardis, but was subsequently
bought of then by the government, and it is now occupied by public
offices and societies.

After sufficiently examining the court and its antiquities, we ascended a
noble staircase that passes, by broad flights and square turns, to the
region above the basement.  Here the palace is cut up and portioned off
into little rooms and passages, and everywhere there were desks,
inkstands, and men, with pens in their fingers or behind their ears.  We
were shown into a little antique chapel, quite covered with frescos in
the Giotto style, but painted by a certain Gozzoli.  They were in pretty
good preservation, and, in fact, I am wrong in comparing them to Giotto's
works, inasmuch as there must have been nearly two hundred years between
the two artists.  The chapel was furnished with curiously carved old
chairs, and looked surprisingly venerable within its little precinct.

We were next guided into the grand gallery, a hall of respectable size,
with a frescoed ceiling, on which is represented the blue sky, and
various members of the Medici family ascending through it by the help of
angelic personages, who seem only to have waited for their society to be
perfectly happy.  At least, this was the meaning, so far as I could
make it out.  Along one side of the gallery were oil-pictures on
looking-glasses, rather good than otherwise; but Rome, with her palaces
and villas, takes the splendor out of all this sort of thing elsewhere.

On our way home, and on our own side of the Ponte Vecchio, we passed the
Palazzo Guicciardini, the ancient residence of the historian of Italy,
who was a politic statesman of his day, and probably as cruel and
unprincipled as any of those whose deeds he has recorded.  Opposite,
across the narrow way, stands the house of Macchiavelli, who was his
friend, and, I should judge, an honester man than he.  The house is
distinguished by a marble tablet, let into the wall, commemorative of
Macchiavelli, but has nothing antique or picturesque about it, being in a
continuous line with other smooth-faced and stuccoed edifices.


June 30th.--Yesterday, at three o'clock P. M., I went to see the final
horse-race of the Feast of St. John, or rather to see the concourse of
people and grandees whom it brought together.  I took my stand in the
vicinity of the spot whence the Grand Duke and his courtiers view the
race, and from this point the scene was rather better worth looking at
than from the street-corners whence I saw it before.  The vista of the
street, stretching far adown between two rows of lofty edifices, was
really gay and gorgeous with the silks, damasks, and tapestries of all
bright hues, that flaunted from windows and balconies, whence ladies
looked forth and looked down, themselves making the liveliest part of the
show.  The whole capacity of the street swarmed with moving heads,
leaving scarce room enough for the carriages, which, as on Sunday, passed
up and down, until the signal for the race was given.  Equipages, too,
were constantly arriving at the door of the building which communicates
with the open loggia, where the Grand Ducal party sit to see and to be
seen.  Two sentinels were standing at the door, and presented arms as
each courtier or ambassador, or whatever dignity it might be, alighted.
Most of them had on gold-embroidered court-dresses; some of them had
military uniforms, and medals in abundance at the breast; and ladies also
came, looking like heaps of lace and gauze in the carriages, but lightly
shaking themselves into shape as they went up the steps.  By and by a
trumpet sounded, a drum beat, and again appeared a succession of half a
dozen royal equipages, each with its six horses, its postilion, coachman,
and three footmen, grand with cocked hats and embroidery; and the
gray-headed, bowing Grand Duke and his nodding Grand Duchess as before.
The Noble Guard ranged themselves on horseback opposite the loggia; but
there was no irksome and impertinent show of ceremony and restraint upon
the people.  The play-guard of volunteer soldiers, who escort the
President of the United States in his Northern progresses, keep back
their fellow-citizens much more sternly and immitigably than the
Florentine guard kept back the populace from its despotic sovereign.

This morning J----- and I have been to the Uffizi gallery.  It was his
first visit there, and he passed a sweeping condemnation upon everything
he saw, except a fly, a snail-shell, a caterpillar, a lemon, a piece of
bread, and a wineglass, in some of the Dutch pictures.  The Venus de'
Medici met with no sort of favor.  His feeling of utter distaste reacted
upon me, and I was sensible of the same weary lack of appreciation that
used to chill me through, in my earlier visits to picture-galleries; the
same doubt, moreover, whether we do not bamboozle ourselves in the
greater part of the admiration which we learn to bestow.  I looked with
some pleasure at one of Correggio's Madonnas in the Tribune,--no divine
and deep-thoughted mother of the Saviour, but a young woman playing with
her first child, as gay and thoughtless as itself.  I looked at Michael
Angelo's Madonna, in which William Ware saw such prophetic depth of
feeling; but I suspect it was one of the many instances in which the
spectator sees more than the painter ever dreamed of.

Straying through the city, after leaving the gallery, we went into the
Church of Or San Michele, and saw in its architecture the traces of its
transformation from a market into a church.  In its pristine state it
consisted of a double row of three great open arches, with the wind
blowing through them, and the sunshine falling aslantwise into them,
while the bustle of the market, the sale of fish, flesh, or fruit went on
within, or brimmed over into the streets that enclosed them on every
side.  But, four or five hundred years ago, the broad arches were built
up with stone-work; windows were pierced through and filled with painted
glass; a high altar, in a rich style of pointed Gothic, was raised;
shrines and confessionals were set up; and here it is, a solemn and
antique church, where a man may buy his salvation instead of his dinner.
At any rate, the Catholic priests will insure it to him, and take the
price.  The sculpture within the beautifully decorated niches, on the
outside of the church, is very curious and interesting.  The statues of
those old saints seem to have that charm of earnestness which so attracts
the admirers of the Pre-Raphaelite painters.

It appears that a picture of the Virgin used to hang against one of the
pillars of the market-place while it was still a market, and in the year
1291 several miracles were wrought by it, insomuch that a chapel was
consecrated for it.  So many worshippers came to the shrine that the
business of the market was impeded, and ultimately the Virgin and St.
Michael won the whole space for themselves.  The upper part of the
edifice was at that time a granary, and is still used for other than
religious purposes.  This church was one spot to which the inhabitants
betook themselves much for refuge and divine assistance during the great
plague described by Boccaccio.


July 2d.--We set out yesterday morning to visit the Palazzo Buonarotti,
Michael Angelo's ancestral home. . . . It is in the Via Ghibellina, an
ordinary-looking, three-story house, with broad-brimmed eaves, a stuccoed
front, and two or three windows painted in fresco, besides the real ones.
Adown the street, there is a glimpse of the hills outside of Florence.
The sun shining heavily directly upon the front, we rang the door-bell,
and then drew back into the shadow that fell from the opposite side of
the street.  After we had waited some time a man looked out from an upper
window, and a woman from a lower one, and informed us that we could not
be admitted now, nor for two or three months to come, the house being
under repairs.  It is a pity, for I wished to see Michael Angelo's sword
and walking-stick and old slippers, and whatever other of his closest
personalities are to be shown. . . .

We passed into the Piazza of the Grand Duke, and looked into the court of
the Palazzo Vecchio, with its beautifully embossed pillars; and, seeing
just beyond the court a staircase of broad and easy steps, we ascended it
at a venture.  Upward and upward we went, flight after flight of stairs,
and through passages, till at last we found an official who ushered us
into a large saloon.  It was the Hall of Audience.  Its heavily embossed
ceiling, rich with tarnished gold, was a feature of antique magnificence,
and the only one that it retained, the floor being paved with tiles and
the furniture scanty or none.  There were, however, three cabinets
standing against the walls, two of which contained very curious and
exquisite carvings and cuttings in ivory; some of them in the Chinese
style of hollow, concentric balls; others, really beautiful works of art:
little crucifixes, statues, saintly and knightly, and cups enriched with
delicate bas-reliefs.  The custode pointed to a small figure of St.
Sebastian, and also to a vase around which the reliefs seemed to assume
life.  Both these specimens, he said, were by Benvenuto Cellini, and
there were many others that might well have been wrought by his famous
hand.  The third cabinet contained a great number and variety of
crucifixes, chalices, and whatever other vessels are needed in altar
service, exquisitely carved out of amber.  They belong to the chapel of
the palace, and into this holy closet we were now conducted.  It is large
enough to accommodate comfortably perhaps thirty worshippers, and is
quite covered with frescos by Ghirlandaio in good preservation, and with
remnants enough of gilding and bright color to show how splendid the
chapel must have been when the Medicean Grand Dukes used to pray here.
The altar is still ready for service, and I am not sure that some of the
wax tapers were not burning; but Lorenzo the Magnificent was nowhere to
be seen.

The custode now led us back through the Hall of Audience into a smaller
room, hung with pictures chiefly of the Medici and their connections,
among whom was one Carolina, an intelligent and pretty child, and Bianca
Capella.

There was nothing else to show us, except a very noble and most spacious
saloon, lighted by two large windows at each end, coming down level with
the floor, and by a row of windows on one side just beneath the cornice.
A gilded framework divides the ceiling into squares, circles, and
octagons, the compartments of which are filled with pictures in oil; and
the walls are covered with immense frescos, representing various battles
and triumphs of the Florentines.  Statues by Michael Angelo, John of
Bologna, and Bandinello, as well historic as ideal, stand round the hall,
and it is really a fit theatre for the historic scenes of a country to be
acted in.  It was built, moreover, with the idea of its being the
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
open, by its gateway, to the public square; and several of the neighbors,
women as well as men, were loitering within its precincts.  The convent,
however, has another and larger cloister, which I suppose is kept free
from interlopers.  The Chiostro Verde is a walk round the four sides of a
square, beneath an arched and groined roof.  One side of the walk looks
upon an enclosed green space with a fountain or a tomb (I forget which)
in the centre; the other side is ornamented all along with a succession
of ancient frescos, representing subjects of Scripture history.  In the
days when the designs were more distinct than now, it must have been a
very effective way for a monk to read Bible history, to see its
personages and events thus passing visibly beside him in his morning and
evening walks.  Beneath the frescos on one side of the cloistered walk,
and along the low stone parapet that separates it from the grass-plat on
the other, are inscriptions to the memory of the dead who are buried
underneath the pavement.  The most of these were modern, and recorded the
names of persons of no particular note.  Other monumental slabs were
inlaid with the pavement itself.  Two or three Dominican monks, belonging
to the convent, passed in and out, while we were there, in their white
habits.

After going round three sides, we came to the fourth, formed by the wall
of the church, and heard the voice of a priest behind a curtain that fell
down before a door.  Lifting it aside, we went in, and found ourselves in
the ancient chapter-house, a large interior formed by two great pointed
arches crossing one another in a groined roof.  The broad spaces of the
walls were entirely covered with frescos that are rich even now, and must
have glowed with an inexpressible splendor, when fresh from the artists'
hands, five hundred years ago.  There is a long period, during which
frescos illuminate a church or a hall in a way that no other adornment
can; when this epoch of brightness is past, they become the dreariest
ghosts of perished magnificence. . . . This chapter-house is the only
part of the church that is now used for the purposes of public worship.
There are several confessionals, and two chapels or shrines, each with
its lighted tapers.  A priest performed mass while we were there, and
several persons, as usual, stepped in to do a little devotion, either
praying on their own account, or uniting with the ceremony that was going
forward.  One man was followed by two little dogs, and in the midst of
his prayers, as one of the dogs was inclined to stray about the church,
he kept snapping his fingers to call him back.  The cool, dusky
refreshment of these holy places, affording such a refuge from the hot
noon of the streets and piazzas, probably suggests devotional ideas to
the people, and it may be, when they are praying, they feel a breath of
Paradise fanning them.  If we could only see any good effects in their
daily life, we might deem it an excellent thing to be able to find
incense and a prayer always ascending, to which every individual may join
his own.  I really wonder that the Catholics are not better men and
women.

When we had looked at the old frescos, . . . . we emerged into the
cloister again, and thence ventured into a passage which would have led
us to the Chiostro Grande, where strangers, and especially ladies,
have no right to go.  It was a secluded corridor, very neatly kept,
bordered with sepulchral monuments, and at the end appeared a vista of
cypress-trees, which indeed were but an illusory perspective, being
painted in fresco.  While we loitered along the sacristan appeared and
offered to show us the church, and led us into the transept on the right
of the high altar, and ushered us into the sacristy, where we found two
artists copying some of Fra Angelico's pictures.  These were painted on
the three wooden leaves of a triptych, and, as usual, were glorified with
a great deal of gilding, so that they seemed to float in the brightness
of a heavenly element.  Solomon speaks of "apples of gold in pictures of
silver."  The pictures of Fra Angelico, and other artists of that age,
are really pictures of gold; and it is wonderful to see how rich the
effect, and how much delicate beauty is attained (by Fra Angelico at
least) along with it.  His miniature-heads appear to me much more
successful than his larger ones.  In a monkish point of view, however,
the chief value of the triptych of which I am speaking does not lie in
the pictures, for they merely serve as the framework of some relics,
which are set all round the edges of the three leaves.  They consist of
little bits and fragments of bones, and of packages carefully tied up in
silk, the contents of which are signified in Gothic letters appended to
each parcel.  The sacred vessels of the church are likewise kept in the
sacristy. . . .

Re-entering the transept, our guide showed us the chapel of the Strozzi
family, which is accessible by a flight of steps from the floor of the
church.  The walls of this chapel are covered with frescos by Orcagna,
representing around the altar the Last Judgment, and on one of the walls
heaven and the assembly of the blessed, and on the other, of course,
hell.  I cannot speak as to the truth of the representation; but, at all
events, it was purgatory to look at it. . . .

We next passed into the choir, which occupies the extreme end of the
church behind the great square mass of the high altar, and is surrounded
with a double row of ancient oaken seats of venerable shape and carving.
The choir is illuminated by a threefold Gothic window, full of richly
painted glass, worth all the frescos that ever stained a wall or ceiling;
but these walls, nevertheless, are adorned with frescos by Ghirlandaio,
and it is easy to see must once have made a magnificent appearance.  I
really was sensible of a sad and ghostly beauty in many of the figures;
but all the bloom, the magic of the painter's touch, his topmost art,
have long ago been rubbed off, the white plaster showing through the
colors in spots, and even in large spaces.  Any other sort of ruin
acquires a beauty proper to its decay, and often superior to that of its
pristine state; but the ruin of a picture, especially of a fresco, is
wholly unredeemed; and, moreover, it dies so slowly that many generations
are likely to be saddened by it.

We next saw the famous picture of the Virgin by Cimabue, which was deemed
a miracle in its day, . . . . and still brightens the sombre walls with
the lustre of its gold ground.  As to its artistic merits, it seems to me
that the babe Jesus has a certain air of state and dignity; but I could
see no charm whatever in the broad-faced Virgin, and it would relieve my
mind and rejoice my spirit if the picture were borne out of the church in
another triumphal procession (like the one which brought it there), and
reverently burnt.  This should be the final honor paid to all human works
that have served a good office in their day, for when their day is
over, if still galvanized into false life, they do harm instead of good.
. . . . The interior of Santa Maria Novella is spacious and in the Gothic
style, though differing from English churches of that order of
architecture.  It is not now kept open to the public, nor were any of the
shrines and chapels, nor even the high altar itself, adorned and lighted
for worship.  The pictures that decorated the shrines along the side
aisles have been removed, leaving bare, blank spaces of brickwork, very
dreary and desolate to behold.  This is almost worse than a black
oil-painting or a faded fresco.  The church was much injured by the
French, and afterwards by the Austrians, both powers having quartered
their troops within the holy precincts.  Its old walls, however, are yet
stalwart enough to outlast another set of frescos, and to see the
beginning and the end of a new school of painting as long-lived as
Cimabue's.  I should be sorry to have the church go to decay, because it
was here that Boccaccio's dames and cavaliers encountered one another,
and formed their plan of retreating into the country during the
plague. . . .

At the door we bought a string of beads, with a small crucifix appended,
in memory of the place.  The beads seem to be of a grayish, pear-shaped
seed, and the seller assured us that they were the tears of St. Job.
They were cheap, probably because Job shed so many tears in his lifetime.

It being still early in the day, we went to the Uffizi gallery, and after
loitering a good while among the pictures, were so fortunate as to find
the room of the bronzes open.  The first object that attracted us was
John of Bologna's Mercury, poising himself on tiptoe, and looking not
merely buoyant enough to float, but as if he possessed more than the
eagle's power of lofty flight.  It seems a wonder that he did not
absolutely fling himself into the air when the artist gave him the last
touch.  No bolder work was ever achieved; nothing so full of life has
been done since.  I was much interested, too, in the original little wax
model, two feet high, of Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus.  The wax seems to
be laid over a wooden framework, and is but roughly finished off. . . .

In an adjoining room are innumerable specimens of Roman and Etruscan
bronzes, great and small.  A bronze Chimera did not strike me as very
ingeniously conceived, the goat's head being merely an adjunct, growing
out of the back of the monster, without possessing any original and
substantive share in its nature.  The snake's head is at the end of the
tail.  The object most really interesting was a Roman eagle, the standard
of the Twenty-fourth Legion, about the size of a blackbird.


July 8th.--On the 6th we went to the Church of the Annunziata, which
stands in the piazza of the same name.  On the corner of the Via dei
Servi is the palace which I suppose to be the one that Browning makes the
scene of his poem, "The Statue and the Bust," and the statue of Duke
Ferdinand sits stately on horseback, with his face turned towards the
window, where the lady ought to appear.  Neither she nor the bust,
however, was visible, at least not to my eyes.  The church occupies one
side of the piazza, and in front of it, as likewise on the two adjoining
sides of the square, there are pillared arcades, constructed by
Brunelleschi or his scholars.  After passing through these arches, and
still before entering the church itself, you come to an ancient cloister,
which is now quite enclosed in glass as a means of preserving some
frescos of Andrea del Sarto and others, which are considered valuable.

Passing the threshold of the church, we were quite dazzled by the
splendor that shone upon us from the ceiling of the nave, the great
parallelograms of which, viewed from one end, look as if richly
embossed all over with gold.  The whole interior, indeed, has an effect
of brightness and magnificence, the walls being covered mostly with
light-colored marble, into which are inlaid compartments of rarer and
richer marbles.  The pillars and pilasters, too, are of variegated
marbles, with Corinthian capitals, that shine just as brightly as if they
were of solid gold, so faithfully have they been gilded and burnished.
The pavement is formed of squares of black and white marble.  There are
no side aisles, but ranges of chapels, with communication from one to
another, stand round the whole extent of the nave and choir; all of
marble, all decorated with pictures, statues, busts, and mural monuments;
all worth, separately, a day's inspection.  The high altar is of great
beauty and richness, . . . . and also the tomb of John of Bologna in a
chapel at the remotest extremity of the church.  In this chapel there are
some bas-reliefs by him, and also a large crucifix, with a marble Christ
upon it.  I think there has been no better sculptor since the days of
Phidias. . . .

The church was founded by seven gentlemen of Florence, who formed
themselves into a religious order called "Servants of Mary."  Many
miraculous cures were wrought here; and the church, in consequence, was
so thickly hung with votive offerings of legs, arms, and other things in
wax, that they used to tumble upon people's heads, so that finally they
were all cleared out as rubbish.  The church is still, I should imagine,
looked upon as a place of peculiar sanctity; for while we were there it
had an unusual number of kneeling worshippers, and persons were passing
from shrine to shrine all round the nave and choir, praying awhile at
each, and thus performing a pilgrimage at little cost of time and labor.
One old gentleman, I observed, carried a cushion or pad, just big enough
for one knee, on which he carefully adjusted his genuflexions before each
altar.  An old woman in the choir prayed alternately to us and to the
saints, with most success, I hope, in her petitions to the latter, though
certainly her prayers to ourselves seemed the more fervent of the two.

When we had gone entirely round the church, we came at last to the chapel
of the Annunziata, which stands on the floor of the nave, on the left
hand as we enter.  It is a very beautiful piece of architecture,--a sort
of canopy of marble, supported upon pillars; and its magnificence within,
in marble and silver, and all manner of holy decoration, is quite
indescribable.  It was built four hundred years ago, by Pietro de'
Medici, and has probably been growing richer ever since.  The altar is
entirely of silver, richly embossed.  As many people were kneeling on the
steps before it as could find room, and most of them, when they finished
their prayers, ascended the steps, kissed over and over again the margin
of the silver altar, laid their foreheads upon it, and then deposited an
offering in a box placed upon the altar's top.  From the dulness of the
chink in the only case when I heard it, I judged it to be a small copper
coin.

In the inner part of this chapel is preserved a miraculous picture of the
"Santissima Annunziata," painted by angels, and held in such holy repute
that forty thousand dollars have lately been expended in providing a new
crown for the sacred personage represented.  The picture is now veiled
behind a curtain; and as it is a fresco, and is not considered to do much
credit to the angelic artists, I was well contented not to see it.

We found a side door of the church admitting us into the great cloister,
which has a walk of intersecting arches round its four sides, paved with
flat tombstones, and broad enough for six people to walk abreast.  On the
walls, in the semicircles of each successive arch, are frescos
representing incidents in the lives of the seven founders of the church,
and all the lower part of the wall is incrusted with marble inscriptions
to the memory of the dead, and mostly of persons who have died not very
long ago.  The space enclosed by the cloistered walk, usually made
cheerful by green grass, has a pavement of tombstones laid in regular
ranges.  In the centre is a stone octagonal structure, which at first I
supposed to be the tomb of some deceased mediaeval personage; but, on
approaching, I found it a well, with its bucket hanging within the curb,
and looking as if it were in constant use.  The surface of the water lay
deep beneath the deepest dust of the dead people, and thence threw up its
picture of the sky; but I think it would not be a moderate thirst that
would induce me to drink of that well.

On leaving the church we bought a little gilt crucifix. . . .

On Sunday evening I paid a short visit to Mr. Powers, and, as usual, was
entertained and instructed with his conversation.  It did not, indeed,
turn upon artistical subjects; but the artistic is only one side of his
character, and, I think, not the principal side.  He might have achieved
valuable success as an engineer and mechanician.  He gave a dissertation
on flying-machines, evidently from his own experience, and came to the
conclusion that it is impossible to fly by means of steam or any other
motive-power now known to man.  No force hitherto attained would suffice
to lift the engine which generated it.  He appeared to anticipate that
flying will be a future mode of locomotion, but not till the moral
condition of mankind is so improved as to obviate the bad uses to which
the power might be applied.  Another topic discussed was a cure for
complaints of the chest by the inhalation of nitric acid; and he produced
his own apparatus for that purpose, being merely a tube inserted into a
bottle containing a small quantity of the acid, just enough to produce
the gas for inhalation.  He told me, too, a remedy for burns accidentally
discovered by himself; viz., to wear wash-leather, or something
equivalent, over the burn, and keep it constantly wet.  It prevents all
pain, and cures by the exclusion of the air.  He evidently has a great
tendency to empirical remedies, and would have made a natural doctor of
mighty potency, possessing the shrewd sense, inventive faculty, and
self-reliance that such persons require.  It is very singular that there
should be an ideal vein in a man of this character.

This morning he called to see me, with intelligence of the failure of the
new attempt to lay the electric cable between England and America; and
here, too, it appears the misfortune might have been avoided if a plan of
his own for laying the cable had been adopted.  He explained his process,
and made it seem as practicable as to put up a bell-wire.  I do not
remember how or why (but appositely) he repeated some verses, from a
pretty little ballad about fairies, that had struck his fancy, and he
wound up his talk with some acute observations on the characters of
General Jackson and other public men.  He told an anecdote, illustrating
the old general's small acquaintance with astronomical science, and his
force of will in compelling a whole dinner-party of better instructed
people than himself to succumb to him in an argument about eclipses and
the planetary system generally.  Powers witnessed the scene himself.  He
thinks that General Jackson was a man of the keenest and surest
intuitions, in respect to men and measures, but with no power of
reasoning out his own conclusions, or of imparting them intellectually to
other persons.  Men who have known Jackson intimately, and in great
affairs, would not agree as to this intellectual and argumentative
deficiency, though they would fully allow the intuitive faculty.  I have
heard General Pierce tell a striking instance of Jackson's power of
presenting his own view of a subject with irresistible force to the mind
of the auditor.  President Buchanan has likewise expressed to me as high
admiration of Jackson as I ever heard one man award to another.  Surely
he was a great man, and his native strength, as well of intellect as
character, compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach;
and the more cunning the individual might be, it served only to make him
the sharper tool.

Speaking of Jackson, and remembering Raphael's picture of Pope Julius
II., the best portrait in the whole world, and excellent in all its
repetitions, I wish it had been possible for Raphael to paint General
Jackson!

Referring again to General Jackson's intuitions, and to Powers's idea
that he was unable to render a reason to himself or others for what he
chose to do, I should have thought that this very probably might have
been the case, were there not such strong evidence to the contrary.  The
highest, or perhaps any high administrative ability is intuitive, and
precedes argument, and rises above it.  It is a revelation of the very
thing to be done, and its propriety and necessity are felt so strongly
that very likely it cannot be talked about; if the doer can likewise
talk, it is an additional and gratuitous faculty, as little to be
expected as that a poet should be able to write an explanatory criticism
on his own poem.  The English overlook this in their scheme of
government, which requires that the members of the national executive
should be orators, and the readiest and most fluent orators that can be
found.  The very fact (on which they are selected) that they are men of
words makes it improbable that they are likewise men of deeds.  And it is
only tradition and old custom, founded on an obsolete state of things,
that assigns any value to parliamentary oratory.  The world has done with
it, except as an intellectual pastime.  The speeches have no effect till
they are converted into newspaper paragraphs; and they had better be
composed as such, in the first place, and oratory reserved for churches,
courts of law, and public dinner-tables.


July 10th.--My wife and I went yesterday forenoon to see the Church of
San Marco, with which is connected a convent of Dominicans. . . . The
interior is not less than three or four hundred years old, and is in the
classic style, with a flat ceiling, gilded, and a lofty arch, supported
by pillars, between the nave and choir.  There are no side aisles, but
ranges of shrines on both sides of the nave, each beneath its own pair of
pillars and pediments.  The pavement is of brick, with here and there a
marble tombstone inlaid.  It is not a magnificent church; but looks dingy
with time and apparent neglect, though rendered sufficiently interesting
by statues of mediaeval date by John of Bologna and other old sculptors,
and by monumental busts and bas-reliefs: also, there is a wooden crucifix
by Giotto, with ancient gilding on it; and a painting of Christ, which
was considered a wonderful work in its day.  Each shrine, or most of
them, at any rate, had its dark old picture, and there is a very old and
hideous mosaic of the Virgin and two saints, which I looked at very
slightly, with the purpose of immediately forgetting it.  Savonarola, the
reforming monk, was a brother of this convent, and was torn from its
shelter, to be subsequently hanged and burnt in the Grand Ducal Piazza.
A large chapel in the left transept is of the Salviati family, dedicated
to St. Anthony, and decorated with several statues of saints, and with
some old frescos.  When we had more than sufficiently examined these, the
custode proposed to show us some frescos of Fra Angelico, and conducted
us into a large cloister, under the arches of which, and beneath a
covering of glass, he pointed to a picture of St. Dominic kneeling at the
Cross.  There are two or three others by the angelic friar in different
parts of the cloister, and a regular series, filling up all the arches,
by various artists.  Its four-sided, cloistered walk surrounds a square,
open to the sky as usual, and paved with gray stones that have no
inscriptions, but probably are laid over graves.  Its walls, however, are
incrusted, and the walk itself is paved with monumental inscriptions on
marble, none of which, so far as I observed, were of ancient date.
Either the fashion of thus commemorating the dead is not ancient in
Florence, or the old tombstones have been removed to make room for new
ones.  I do not know where the monks themselves have their burial-place;
perhaps in an inner cloister, which we did not see.  All the inscriptions
here, I believe, were in memory of persons not connected with the
convent.

A door in the wall of the cloister admitted us into the chapter-house,
its interior moderately spacious, with a roof formed by intersecting
arches.  Three sides of the walls were covered with blessed whitewash;
but on the fourth side, opposite to the entrance, was a great fresco of
the Crucifixion, by Fra Angelico, surrounded with a border or pictured
framework, in which are represented the heads of saints, prophets, and
sibyls, as large as life.  The cross of the Saviour and those of the
thieves were painted against a dark red sky; the figures upon them were
lean and attenuated, evidently the vague conceptions of a man who had
never seen a naked figure.  Beneath, was a multitude of people, most of
whom were saints who had lived and been martyred long after the
Crucifixion; and some of these had wounds from which gilded rays shone
forth, as if the inner glory and blessedness of the holy men blazed
through them.  It is a very ugly picture, and its ugliness is not that of
strength and vigor, but of weakness and incompetency.  Fra Angelico
should have confined himself to miniature heads, in which his delicacy of
touch and minute labor often produce an excellent effect.  The custode
informed us that there were more frescos of this pious artist in the
interior of the convent, into which I might be allowed admittance, but
not my wife.  I declined seeing them, and heartily thanked heaven for my
escape.

Returning through the church, we stopped to look at a shrine on the right
of the entrance, where several wax candles were lighted, and the steps of
which were crowded with worshippers.  It was evidently a spot of special
sanctity, and, approaching the steps, we saw, behind a gilded framework
of stars and protected by glass, a wooden image of the Saviour, naked,
covered with spots of blood, crowned with thorns, and expressing all the
human wretchedness that the carver's skill could represent.  The whole
shrine, within the glass, was hung with offerings, as well of silver and
gold as of tinsel and trumpery, and the body of Christ glistened with
gold chains and ornaments, and with watches of silver and gold, some of
which appeared to be of very old manufacture, and others might be new.
Amid all this glitter the face of pain and grief looked forth, not a whit
comforted.  While we stood there, a woman, who had been praying, arose
from her knees and laid an offering of a single flower upon the shrine.

The corresponding arch, on the opposite side of the entrance, contained a
wax-work within a large glass case, representing the Nativity.  I do not
remember how the Blessed Infant looked, but the Virgin was gorgeously
dressed in silks, satins, and gauzes, with spangles and ornaments of all
kinds, and, I believe, brooches of real diamonds on her bosom.  Her
attire, judging from its freshness and newness of glitter, might have
been put on that very morning.


July 13th.--We went for the second time, this morning, to the Academy of
Fine Arts, and I looked pretty thoroughly at the Pre-Raphaelite pictures,
few of which are really worth looking at nowadays.  Cimabue and Giotto
might certainly be dismissed, henceforth and forever, without any
detriment to the cause of good art.  There is what seems to me a better
picture than either of these has produced, by Bonamico Buffalmacco, an
artist of about their date or not long after.  The first real picture in
the series is the "Adoration of the Magi," by Gentile da Fabriano, a
really splendid work in all senses, with noble and beautiful figures in
it, and a crowd of personages, managed with great skill.  Three pictures
by Perugino are the only other ones I cared to look at.  In one of these,
the face of the Virgin who holds the dead Christ on her knees has a
deeper expression of woe than can ever have been painted since.  After
Perugino the pictures cease to be interesting; the art came forward with
rapid strides, but the painters and their productions do not take nearly
so much hold of the spectator as before.  They all paint better than
Giotto and Cimabue,--in some respects better than Perugino; but they
paint in vain, probably because they were not nearly so much in earnest,
and meant far less, though possessing the dexterity to express far more.
Andrea del Sarto appears to have been a good painter, yet I always turn
away readily from his pictures.  I looked again, and for a good while, at
Carlo Dolce's portrait of the Eternal Father, for it is a miracle and
masterpiece of absurdity, and almost equally a miracle of pictorial art.
It is the All-powerless, a fair-haired, soft, consumptive deity, with a
mouth that has fallen open through very weakness.  He holds one hand on
his stomach, as if the wickedness and wretchedness of mankind made him
qualmish; and he is looking down out of Heaven with an expression of
pitiable appeal, or as if seeking somewhere for assistance in his heavy
task of ruling the universe.  You might fancy such a being falling on his
knees before a strong-willed man, and beseeching him to take the reins of
omnipotence out of his hands.  No wonder that wrong gets the better of
right, and that good and ill are confounded, if the Supreme Head were as
here depicted; for I never saw, and nobody else ever saw, so perfect a
representation of a person burdened with a task infinitely above his
strength.  If Carlo Dolce had been wicked enough to know what he was
doing, the picture would have been most blasphemous,--a satire, in the
very person of the Almighty, against all incompetent rulers, and against
the rickety machine and crazy action of the universe.  Heaven forgive me
for such thoughts as this picture has suggested!  It must be added that
the great original defect in the character as here represented is an easy
good-nature.  I wonder what Michael Angelo would have said to this
painting.

In the large, enclosed court connected with the Academy there are a
number of statues, bas-reliefs, and casts, and what was especially
interesting, the vague and rude commencement of a statue of St. Matthew
by Michael Angelo.  The conceptions of this great sculptor were so
godlike that he seems to have been discontented at not likewise
possessing the godlike attribute of creating and embodying them with an
instantaneous thought, and therefore we often find sculptures from his
hand left at the critical point of their struggle to get out of the
marble.  The statue of St. Matthew looks like the antediluvian fossil of
a human being of an epoch when humanity was mightier and more majestic
than now, long ago imprisoned in stone, and half uncovered again.


July 16th.--We went yesterday forenoon to see the Bargello.  I do not
know anything more picturesque in Florence than the great interior court
of this ancient Palace of the Podesta, with the lofty height of the
edifice looking down into the enclosed space, dark and stern, and the
armorial bearings of a long succession of magistrates carved in stone
upon the walls, a garland, as it were, of these Gothic devices extending
quite round the court.  The best feature of the whole is the broad stone
staircase, with its heavy balustrade, ascending externally from the court
to the iron-grated door in the second story.  We passed the sentinels
under the lofty archway that communicates with the street, and went up
the stairs without being questioned or impeded.  At the iron-grated door,
however, we were met by two officials in uniform, who courteously
informed us that there was nothing to be exhibited in the Bargello except
an old chapel containing some frescos by Giotto, and that these could
only be seen by making a previous appointment with the custode, he not
being constantly on hand.  I was not sorry to escape the frescos, though
one of them is a portrait of Dante.

We next went to the Church of the Badia, which is built in the form of a
Greek cross, with a flat roof embossed and once splendid with now
tarnished gold.  The pavement is of brick, and the walls of dark stone,
similar to that of the interior of the cathedral (pietra serena), and
there being, according to Florentine custom, but little light, the effect
was sombre, though the cool gloomy dusk was refreshing after the hot
turmoil and dazzle of the adjacent street.  Here we found three or four
Gothic tombs, with figures of the deceased persons stretched in marble
slumber upon them.  There were likewise a picture or two, which it was
impossible to see; indeed, I have hardly ever met with a picture in a
church that was not utterly wasted and thrown away in the deep shadows of
the chapel it was meant to adorn.  If there is the remotest chance of its
being seen, the sacristan hangs a curtain before it for the sake of his
fee for withdrawing it.  In the chapel of the Bianco family we saw (if it
could be called seeing) what is considered the finest oil-painting of Fra
Filippo Lippi.  It was evidently hung with reference to a lofty window on
the other side of the church, whence sufficient light might fall upon it
to show a picture so vividly painted as this is, and as most of Fra
Filippo Lippi's are.  The window was curtained, however, and the chapel
so dusky that I could make out nothing.

Several persons came in to say their prayers during the little time that
we remained in the church, and as we came out we passed a good woman who
sat knitting in the coolness of the vestibule, which was lined with mural
tombstones.  Probably she spends the day thus, keeping up the little
industry of her fingers, slipping into the church to pray whenever a
devotional impulse swells into her heart, and asking an alms as often as
she sees a person of charitable aspect.

From the church we went to the Uffizi gallery, and reinspected the
greater part of it pretty faithfully.  We had the good fortune, too,
again to get admittance into the cabinet of bronzes, where we admired
anew the wonderful airiness of John of Bologna's Mercury, which, as I now
observed, rests on nothing substantial, but on the breath of a zephyr
beneath him.  We also saw a bronze bust of one of the Medici by Benvenuto
Cellini, and a thousand other things the curiosity of which is overlaid
by their multitude.  The Roman eagle, which I have recorded to be about
the size of a blackbird, I now saw to be as large as a pigeon.

On our way towards the door of the gallery, at our departure, we saw the
cabinet of gems open, and again feasted our eyes with its concentrated
brilliancies and magnificences.  Among them were two crystal cups, with
engraved devices, and covers of enamelled gold, wrought by Benvenuto
Cellini, and wonderfully beautiful.  But it is idle to mention one or two
things, when all are so beautiful and curious; idle, too, because
language is not burnished gold, with here and there a brighter word
flashing like a diamond; and therefore no amount of talk will give the
slightest idea of one of these elaborate handiworks.


July 27th.--I seldom go out nowadays, having already seen Florence
tolerably well, and the streets being very hot, and myself having been
engaged in sketching out a romance [The Marble Faun.--ED.], which whether
it will ever come to anything is a point yet to be decided.  At any rate,
it leaves me little heart for journalizing and describing new things; and
six months of uninterrupted monotony would be more valuable to me just
now, than the most brilliant succession of novelties.

Yesterday I spent a good deal of time in watching the setting out of a
wedding party from our door; the bride being the daughter of an English
lady, the Countess of ------.  After all, there was nothing very
characteristic.  The bridegroom is a young man of English birth, son of
the Countess of St. G------, who inhabits the third piano of this Casa
del Bello.  The very curious part of the spectacle was the swarm of
beggars who haunted the street all day; the most wretched mob
conceivable, chiefly women, with a few blind people, and some old men and
boys.  Among these the bridal party distributed their beneficence in the
shape of some handfuls of copper, with here and there a half-paul
intermixed; whereupon the whole wretched mob flung themselves in a heap
upon the pavement, struggling, lighting, tumbling one over another, and
then looking up to the windows with petitionary gestures for more and
more, and still for more.  Doubtless, they had need enough, for they
looked thin, sickly, ill-fed, and the women ugly to the last degree.  The
wedding party had a breakfast above stairs, which lasted till four
o'clock, and then the bridegroom took his bride in a barouche and pair,
which was already crammed with his own luggage and hers. . . . He was a
well-looking young man enough, in a uniform of French gray with silver
epaulets; more agreeable in aspect than his bride, who, I think, will
have the upper hand in their domestic life.  I observed that, on getting
into the barouche, he sat down on her dress, as he could not well help
doing, and received a slight reprimand in consequence.  After their
departure, the wedding guests took their leave; the most noteworthy
person being the Pope's Nuncio (the young man being son of the Pope's
Chamberlain, and one of the Grand Duke's Noble Guard), an ecclesiastical
personage in purple stockings, attended by two priests, all of whom got
into a coach, the driver and footmen of which wore gold-laced cocked hats
and other splendors.

To-day I paid a short visit to the gallery of the Pitti Palace.  I looked
long at a Madonna of Raphael's, the one which is usually kept in the
Grand Duke's private apartments, only brought into the public gallery for
the purpose of being copied.  It is the holiest of all Raphael's
Madonnas, with a great reserve in the expression, a sense of being apart,
and yet with the utmost tenderness and sweetness; although she drops her
eyelids before her like a veil, as it were, and has a primness of eternal
virginity about the mouth.  It is one of Raphael's earlier works, when he
mixed more religious sentiment with his paint than afterwards.
Perugino's pictures give the impression of greater sincerity and
earnestness than Raphael's, though the genius of Raphael often gave him
miraculous vision.


July 28th.--Last evening we went to the Powers's, and sat with them on
the terrace, at the top of the house, till nearly ten o'clock.  It was a
delightful, calm, summer evening, and we were elevated far above all the
adjacent roofs, and had a prospect of the greater part of Florence and
its towers, and the surrounding hills, while directly beneath us rose the
trees of a garden, and they hardly sent their summits higher than we sat.
At a little distance, with only a house or two between, was a theatre in
full action, the Teatro Goldoni, which is an open amphitheatre, in the
ancient fashion, without any roof.  We could see the upper part of the
proscenium, and, had we been a little nearer, might have seen the whole
performance, as did several boys who crept along the tops of the
surrounding houses.  As it was, we heard the music and the applause, and
now and then an actor's stentorian tones, when we chose to listen.  Mrs.
P------ and my wife, U---- and Master Bob, sat in a group together, and
chatted in one corner of our aerial drawing-room, while Mr. Powers and
myself leaned against the parapet, and talked of innumerable things.
When the clocks struck the hour, or the bells rang from the steeples, as
they are continually doing, I spoke of the sweetness of the Florence
bells, the tones of some of them being as if the bell were full of liquid
melody, and shed it through the air on being upturned.  I had supposed,
in my lack of musical ear, that the bells of the Campanile were the
sweetest; but Mr. Powers says that there is a defect in their tone, and
that the bell of the Palazzo Vecchio is the most melodious he ever heard.
Then he spoke of his having been a manufacturer of organs, or, at least,
of reeds for organs, at one period of his life.  I wonder what he has not
been!  He told me of an invention of his in the musical line, a jewsharp
with two tongues; and by and by he produced it for my inspection.  It was
carefully kept in a little wooden case, and was very neatly and
elaborately constructed, with screws to tighten it, and a silver
centre-piece between the two tongues.  Evidently a great deal of thought
had been bestowed on this little harp; but Mr. Powers told me that it was
an utter failure, because the tongues were apt to interfere and jar with
one another, although the strain of music was very sweet and melodious--
as he proved, by playing on it a little--when everything went right.  It
was a youthful production, and he said that its failure had been a great
disappointment to him at the time; whereupon I congratulated him that his
failures had been in small matters, and his successes in great ones.

We talked, furthermore, about instinct and reason, and whether the brute
creation have souls, and, if they have none, how justice is to be done
them for their sufferings here; and Mr. Powers came finally to the
conclusion that brutes suffer only in appearance, and that God enjoys for
them all that they seem to enjoy, and that man is the only intelligent
and sentient being.  We reasoned high about other states of being; and I
suggested the possibility that there might be beings inhabiting this
earth, contemporaneously with us, and close beside us, but of whose
existence and whereabout we could have no perception, nor they of ours,
because we are endowed with different sets of senses; for certainly it
was in God's power to create beings who should communicate with nature by
innumerable other senses than those few which we possess.  Mr. Powers
gave hospitable reception to this idea, and said that it had occurred to
himself; and he has evidently thought much and earnestly about such
matters; but is apt to let his idea crystallize into a theory, before he
can have sufficient data for it.  He is a Swedenborgian in faith.

The moon had risen behind the trees, while we were talking, and Powers
intimated his idea that beings analogous to men--men in everything except
the modifications necessary to adapt them to their physical
circumstances--inhabited the planets, and peopled them with beautiful
shapes.  Each planet, however, must have its own standard of the
beautiful, I suppose; and probably his sculptor's eye would not see much
to admire in the proportions of an inhabitant of Saturn.

The atmosphere of Florence, at least when we ascend a little way into it,
suggests planetary speculations.  Galileo found it so, and Mr. Powers and
I pervaded the whole universe; but finally crept down his garret-stairs,
and parted, with a friendly pressure of the hand.



VILLA MONTANTO.  MONTE BENI.


August 2d.--We had grown weary of the heat of Florence within the walls,
. . . . there being little opportunity for air and exercise except within
the precincts of our little garden, which, also, we feared might breed
malaria, or something akin to it.  We have therefore taken this suburban
villa for the two next months, and, yesterday morning, we all came out
hither.  J-----  had preceded us with B. P------.  The villa is on a hill
called Bellosguardo, about a mile beyond the Porta Romana.  Less than
half an hour's walk brought us, who were on foot, to the iron gate of our
villa, which we found shut and locked.  We shouted to be let in, and
while waiting for somebody to appear, there was a good opportunity to
contemplate the external aspect of the villa.  After we had waited a few
minutes, J----- came racing down to the gate, laughing heartily, and said
that Bob and he had been in the house, but had come out, shutting the
door behind them; and as the door closed with a springlock, they could
not get in again.  Now as the key of the outer gate as well as that of
the house itself was in the pocket of J-----'s coat, left inside, we were
shut out of our own castle, and compelled to carry on a siege against it,
without much likelihood of taking it, although the garrison was willing
to surrender.  But B. P------ called in the assistance of the contadini
who cultivate the ground, and live in the farm-house close by; and one of
them got into a window by means of a ladder, so that the keys were got,
the gates opened, and we finally admitted.  Before examining any other
part of the house, we climbed to the top of the tower, which, indeed, is
not very high, in proportion to its massive square.  Very probably,
its original height was abbreviated, in compliance with the law that
lowered so many of the fortified towers of noblemen within the walls of
Florence. . . . The stairs were not of stone, built in with the
original mass of the tower, as in English castles, but of now decayed
wood, which shook beneath us, and grew more and more crazy as we
ascended.  It will not be many years before the height of the tower
becomes unattainable. . . . Near at hand, in the vicinity of the city,
we saw the convent of Monte Olivetto, and other structures that looked
like convents, being built round an enclosed square; also numerous white
villas, many of which had towers, like that we were standing upon, square
and massive, some of them battlemented on the summit, and others
apparently modernized for domestic purposes.  Among them U---- pointed
out Galileo's tower, whither she made an excursion the other day.  It
looked lower than our own, but seemed to stand on a higher elevation.  We
also saw the duke's villa, the Poggio, with a long avenue of cypresses
leading from it, as if a funeral were going forth.  And having wasted
thus much of description on the landscape, I will finish with saying that
it lacked only water to be a very fine one.  It is strange what a
difference the gleam of water makes, and how a scene awakens and comes to
life wherever it is visible.  The landscape, moreover, gives the beholder
(at least, this beholder) a sense of oppressive sunshine and scanty
shade, and does not incite a longing to wander through it on foot, as a
really delightful landscape should.  The vine, too, being cultivated in
so trim a manner, does not suggest that idea of luxuriant fertility,
which is the poetical notion of a vineyard.  The olive-orchards have a
pale and unlovely hue.  An English view would have been incomparably
richer in its never-fading green; and in my own country, the wooded hills
would have been more delightful than these peaks and ridges of dreary and
barren sunshine; and there would have been the bright eyes of half a
dozen little lakes, looking heavenward, within an extent like that of the
Val d' Arno.

By and by mamma's carriage came along the dusty road, and passed through
the iron gateway, which we had left open for her reception.  We shouted
down to her and R-----, and they waved their handkerchiefs upward to us;
and, on my way down, I met R----- and the servant coming up through the
ghostly rooms.

The rest of the day we spent mostly in exploring the premises.  The house
itself is of almost bewildering extent, insomuch that we might each of us
have a suite of rooms individually.  I have established myself on the
ground-floor, where I have a dressing-room, a large vaulted saloon, hung
with yellow damask, and a square writing-study, the walls and ceilings of
the two latter apartments being ornamented with angels and cherubs aloft
in fresco, and with temples, statues, vases, broken columns, peacocks,
parrots, vines, and sunflowers below.  I know not how many more saloons,
anterooms, and sleeping-chambers there are on this same basement story,
besides an equal number over them, and a great subterranean
establishment.  I saw some immense jars there, which I suppose were
intended to hold oil; and iron kettles, for what purpose I cannot tell.
There is also a chapel in the house, but it is locked up, and we cannot
yet with certainty find the door of it, nor even, in this great
wilderness of a house, decide absolutely what space the holy precincts
occupy.  Adjoining U----'s chamber, which is in the tower, there is a
little oratory, hung round with sacred prints of very ancient date, and
with crucifixes, holy-water vases, and other consecrated things; and
here, within a glass case, there is the representation of an undraped
little boy in wax, very prettily modelled, and holding up a heart that
looks like a bit of red sealing-wax.  If I had found him anywhere else I
should have taken him for Cupid; but, being in an oratory, I presume him
to have some religious signification.  In the servants' room a crucifix
hung on one side of the bed, and a little vase for holy water, now
overgrown with a cobweb, on the other; and, no doubt, all the other
sleeping-apartments would have been equally well provided, only that
their occupants were to be heretics.

The lower floor of the house is tolerably furnished, and looks cheerful
with its frescos, although the bare pavements in every room give an
impression of discomfort.  But carpets are universally taken up in Italy
during summer-time.  It must have been an immense family that could have
ever filled such a house with life.  We go on voyages of discovery, and
when in quest of any particular point, are likely enough to fetch up at
some other.  This morning I had difficulty in finding my way again to the
top of the tower.  One of the most peculiar rooms is constructed close to
the tower, under the roof of the main building, but with no external
walls on two sides!  It is thus left open to the air, I presume for the
sake of coolness.  A parapet runs round the exposed sides for the sake of
security.  Some of the palaces in Florence have such open loggias in
their upper stories, and I saw others on our journey hither, after
arriving in Tuscany.

The grounds immediately around the house are laid out in gravel-walks,
and ornamented with shrubbery, and with what ought to be a grassy lawn;
but the Italian sun is quite as little favorable to beauty of that kind
as our own.  I have enjoyed the luxury, however, almost for the first
time since I left my hill-top at the Wayside, of flinging myself at full
length on the ground without any fear of catching cold.  Moist England
would punish a man soundly for taking such liberties with her greensward.
A podere, or cultivated tract, comprising several acres, belongs to the
villa, and seems to be fertile, like all the surrounding country.  The
possessions of different proprietors are not separated by fences, but
only marked out by ditches; and it seems possible to walk miles and
miles, along the intersecting paths, without obstruction.  The rural
laborers, so far as I have observed, go about in their shirt-sleeves, and
look very much like tanned and sunburnt Yankees.

Last night it was really a work of time and toil to go about making our
defensive preparations for the night; first closing the iron gate, then
the ponderous and complicated fastenings of the house door, then the
separate barricadoes of each iron-barred window on the lower floor, with
a somewhat slighter arrangement above.  There are bolts and shutters,
however, for every window in the house, and I suppose it would not be
amiss to put them all in use.  Our garrison is so small that we must
depend more upon the strength of our fortifications than upon our own
active efforts in case of an attack.  In England, in an insulated country
house, we should need all these bolts and bars, and Italy is not thought
to be the safer country of the two.

It deserves to be recorded that the Count Montanto, a nobleman, and
seemingly a man of property, should deem it worth while to let his
country seat, and reside during the hot months in his palace in the city,
for the consideration of a comparatively small sum a month.  He seems to
contemplate returning hither for the autumn and winter, when the
situation must be very windy and bleak, and the cold death-like in these
great halls; and then, it is to be supposed, he will let his palace in
town.  The Count, through the agency of his son, bargained very stiffly
for, and finally obtained, three dollars in addition to the sum which we
at first offered him.  This indicates that even a little money is still a
matter of great moment in Italy.  Signor del Bello, who, I believe, is
also a nobleman, haggled with us about some cracked crockery at our late
residence, and finally demanded and received fifty cents in compensation.
But this poor gentleman has been a spendthrift, and now acts as the agent
of another.


August 3d.--Yesterday afternoon William Story called on me, he being on a
day or two's excursion from Siena, where he is spending the summer with
his family.  He was very entertaining and conversative, as usual, and
said, in reply to my question whether he were not anxious to return to
Cleopatra, that he had already sketched out another subject for
sculpture, which would employ him during next winter.  He told me, what I
was glad to hear, that his sketches of Italian life, intended for the
"Atlantic Monthly," and supposed to be lost, have been recovered.
Speaking of the superstitiousness of the Italians, he said that they
universally believe in the influence of the evil eye.  The evil influence
is supposed not to be dependent on the will of the possessor of the evil
eye; on the contrary, the persons to whom he wishes well are the very
ones to suffer by it.  It is oftener found in monks than in any other
class of people; and on meeting a monk, and encountering his eye, an
Italian usually makes a defensive sign by putting both hands behind him,
with the forefingers and little fingers extended, although it is a
controverted point whether it be not more efficacious to extend the hand
with its outspread fingers towards the suspected person.  It is
considered an evil omen to meet a monk on first going out for the day.
The evil eye may be classified with the phenomena of mesmerism.  The
Italians, especially the Neapolitans, very generally wear amulets.  Pio
Nono, perhaps as being the chief of all monks and other religious people,
is supposed to have an evil eye of tenfold malignancy; and its effect has
been seen in the ruin of all schemes for the public good so soon as they
are favored by him.  When the pillar in the Piazza de' Spagna,
commemorative of his dogma of the Immaculate Conception, was to be
erected, the people of Rome refused to be present, or to have anything to
do with it, unless the pope promised to abstain from interference.  His
Holiness did promise, but so far broke his word as to be present one day
while it was being erected, and on that day a man was killed.  A little
while ago there was a Lord Clifford, an English Catholic nobleman,
residing in Italy, and, happening to come to Rome, he sent his
compliments to Pio Nono, and requested the favor of an interview.  The
pope, as it happened, was indisposed, or for some reason could not see
his lordship, but very kindly sent him his blessing.  Those who knew of
it shook their heads, and intimated that it would go ill with his
lordship now that he had been blessed by Pio Nono, and the very next day
poor Lord Clifford was dead!  His Holiness had better construe the
scriptural injunction literally, and take to blessing his enemies.

I walked into town with J------ this morning, and, meeting a monk in the
Via Furnace, I thought it no more than reasonable, as the good father
fixed his eyes on me, to provide against the worst by putting both hands
behind me, with the forefingers and little fingers stuck out.

In speaking of the little oratory connected with U----'s chamber, I
forgot to mention the most remarkable object in it.  It is a skull, the
size of life (or death). . . . This part of the house must be very old,
probably coeval with the tower.  The ceiling of U----'s apartment is
vaulted with intersecting arches; and adjoining it is a very large
saloon, likewise with a vaulted and groined ceiling, and having a
cushioned divan running all round the walls.  The windows of these rooms
look out on the Val d' Arno.

The apartment above this saloon is of the same size, and hung with
engraved portraits, printed on large sheets by the score and hundred
together, and enclosed in wooden frames.  They comprise the whole series
of Roman emperors, the succession of popes, the kings of Europe, the
doges of Venice, and the sultans of Turkey.  The engravings bear
different dates between 1685 and thirty years later, and were executed at
Rome.


August 4th.--We ascended our tower yesterday afternoon to see the sunset.
In my first sketch of the Val d' Arno I said that the Arno seemed to hold
its course near the bases of the hills.  I now observe that the line of
trees which marks its current divides the valley into two pretty equal
parts, and the river runs nearly east and west. . . . At last, when it
was growing dark, we went down, groping our way over the shaky
staircases, and peeping into each dark chamber as we passed.  I gratified
J----- exceedingly by hitting my nose against the wall.  Reaching the
bottom, I went into the great saloon, and stood at a window watching the
lights twinkle forth, near and far, in the valley, and listening to the
convent bells that sounded from Monte Olivetto, and more remotely still.
The stars came out, and the constellation of the Dipper hung exactly over
the Val d' Arno, pointing to the North Star above the hills on my right.


August 12th.--We drove into town yesterday afternoon, with Miss Blagden,
to call on Mr. Kirkup, an old Englishman who has resided a great many
years in Florence.  He is noted as an antiquarian, and has the reputation
of being a necromancer, not undeservedly, as he is deeply interested in
spirit-rappings, and holds converse, through a medium, with dead poets
and emperors.  He lives in an old house, formerly a residence of the
Knights Templars, hanging over the Arno, just as you come upon the Ponte
Vecchio; and, going up a dark staircase and knocking at a door on one
side of the landing-place, we were received by Mr. Kirkup.  He had had
notice of our visit, and was prepared for it, being dressed in a blue
frock-coat of rather an old fashion, with a velvet collar, and in a thin
waistcoat and pantaloons fresh from the drawer; looking very sprucely, in
short, and unlike his customary guise, for Miss Blagden hinted to us that
the poor gentleman is generally so untidy that it is not quite pleasant
to take him by the hand.  He is rather low of stature, with a pale,
shrivelled face, and hair and beard perfectly white, and the hair of a
particularly soft and silken texture.  He has a high, thin nose, of the
English aristocratic type; his eyes have a queer, rather wild look, and
the eyebrows are arched above them, so that he seems all the time to be
seeing something that strikes him with surprise.  I judged him to be a
little crack-brained, chiefly on the strength of this expression.  His
whole make is delicate, his hands white and small, and his appearance and
manners those of a gentleman, with rather more embroidery of courtesy
than belongs to an Englishman.  He appeared to be very nervous,
tremulous, indeed, to his fingers' ends, without being in any degree
disturbed or embarrassed by our presence.  Finally, he is very deaf; an
infirmity that quite took away my pleasure in the interview, because it
is impossible to say anything worth while when one is compelled to raise
one's voice above its ordinary level.

He ushered us through two or three large rooms, dark, dusty, hung with
antique-looking pictures, and lined with bookcases containing, I doubt
not, a very curious library.  Indeed, he directed my attention to one
case, and said that he had collected those works, in former days, merely
for the sake of laughing at them.  They were books of magic and occult
sciences.  What he seemed really to value, however, were some manuscript
copies of Dante, of which he showed us two: one, a folio on parchment,
beautifully written in German text, the letters as clear and accurately
cut as printed type; the other a small volume, fit, as Mr. Kirkup said,
to be carried in a capacious mediaeval sleeve.  This also was on vellum,
and as elegantly executed as the larger one; but the larger had beautiful
illuminations, the vermilion and gold of which looked as brilliant now as
they did five centuries ago.  Both of these books were written early in
the fourteenth century.  Mr. Kirkup has also a plaster cast of Dante's
face, which he believes to be the original one taken from his face after
death; and he has likewise his own accurate tracing from Giotto's fresco
of Dante in the chapel of the Bargello.  This fresco was discovered
through Mr. Kirkup's means, and the tracing is particularly valuable,
because the original has been almost destroyed by rough usage in drawing
out a nail that had been driven into the eye.  It represents the profile
of a youthful but melancholy face, and has the general outline of Dante's
features in other portraits.

Dante has held frequent communications with Mr. Kirkup through a medium,
the poet being described by the medium as wearing the same dress seen in
the youthful portrait, but as hearing more resemblance to the cast taken
from his dead face than to the picture from his youthful one.

There was a very good picture of Savonarola in one of the rooms, and many
other portraits, paintings, and drawings, some of them ancient, and
others the work of Mr. Kirkup himself.  He has the torn fragment of an
exquisite drawing of a nude figure by Rubens, and a portfolio of other
curious drawings.  And besides books and works of art, he has no end of
antique knick-knackeries, none of which we had any time to look at; among
others some instruments with which nuns used to torture themselves in
their convents by way of penance.  But the greatest curiosity of all, and
no antiquity, was a pale, large-eyed little girl, about four years old,
who followed the conjurer's footsteps wherever he went.  She was the
brightest and merriest little thing in the world, and frisked through
those shadowy old chambers, among the dead people's trumpery, as gayly as
a butterfly flits among flowers and sunshine.

The child's mother was a beautiful girl named Regina, whose portrait Mr.
Kirkup showed us on the wall.  I never saw a more beautiful and striking
face claiming to be a real one.  She was a Florentine, of low birth, and
she lived with the old necromancer as his spiritual medium.  He showed us
a journal, kept during her lifetime, and read from it his notes of an
interview with the Czar Alexander, when that potentate communicated to
Mr. Kirkup that he had been poisoned.  The necromancer set a great value
upon Regina, . . . . and when she died he received her poor baby into his
heart, and now considers it absolutely his own.  At any rate, it is a
happy belief for him, since he has nothing else in the world to love, and
loves the child entirely, and enjoys all the bliss of fatherhood, though
he must have lived as much as seventy years before he began to taste it.

The child inherits her mother's gift of communication with the spiritual
world, so that the conjurer can still talk with Regina through the baby
which she left, and not only with her, but with Dante, and any other
great spirit that may choose to visit him.  It is a very strange story,
and this child might be put at once into a romance, with all her history
and environment; the ancient Knight Templar palace, with the Arno flowing
under the iron-barred windows, and the Ponte Vecchio, covered with its
jewellers' shops, close at hand; the dark, lofty chambers with faded
frescos on the ceilings, black pictures hanging on the walls, old books
on the shelves, and hundreds of musty antiquities, emitting an odor of
past centuries; the shrivelled, white-bearded old man, thinking all the
time of ghosts, and looking into the child's eyes to seek them; and the
child herself, springing so freshly out of the soil, so pretty, so
intelligent, so playful, with never a playmate save the conjurer and a
kitten.  It is a Persian kitten, and lay asleep in a window; but when I
touched it, it started up at once in as gamesome a mood as the child
herself.

The child looks pale, and no wonder, seldom or never stirring out of that
old palace, or away from the river atmosphere.  Miss Blagden advised Mr.
Kirkup to go with her to the seaside or into the country, and he did not
deny that it might do her good, but seemed to be hampered by an old man's
sluggishness and dislike of change.  I think he will not live a great
while, for he seems very frail.  When he dies the little girl will
inherit what property he may leave.  A lady, Catharine Fleeting, an
Englishwoman, and a friend of Mr. Kirkup, has engaged to take her in
charge.  She followed us merrily to the door, and so did the Persian
kitten, and Mr. Kirkup shook hands with us, over and over again, with
vivacious courtesy, his manner having been characterized by a great deal
of briskness throughout the interview.  He expressed himself delighted to
have met one (whose books he had read), and said that the day would be a
memorable one to him,--which I did not in the least believe.

Mr. Kirkup is an intimate friend of Trelawny, author of "Adventures of a
Younger Son," and, long ago, the latter promised him that, if he ever
came into possession of the family estate, he would divide it with him.
Trelawny did really succeed to the estate, and lost no time in forwarding
to his friend the legal documents, entitling him to half of the property.
But Mr. Kirkup declined the gift, as he himself was not destitute, and
Trelawny had a brother.  There were two pictures of Trelawny in the
saloons, one a slight sketch on the wall, the other a half-length
portrait in a Turkish dress; both handsome, but indicating no very
amiable character.  It is not easy to forgive Trelawny for uncovering
dead Byron's limbs, and telling that terrible story about them,--equally
disgraceful to himself, be it truth or a lie.

It seems that Regina had a lover, and a sister who was very disreputable
It rather adds than otherwise to the romance of the affair,--the idea
that this pretty little elf has no right whatever to the asylum which she
has found.  Her name is Imogen.

The small manuscript copy of Dante which he showed me was written by a
Florentine gentleman of the fourteenth century, one of whose ancestors
the poet had met and talked with in Paradise.


August 19th.--Here is a good Italian incident, which I find in Valery.
Andrea del Castagno was a painter in Florence in the fifteenth century;
and he had a friend, likewise a painter, Domenico of Venice.  The latter
had the secret of painting in oils, and yielded to Castagno's entreaties
to impart it to him.  Desirous of being the sole possessor of this great
secret, Castagno waited only the night to assassinate Domenico, who so
little suspected his treachery, that he besought those who found him
bleeding and dying to take him to his friend Castagno, that he might die
in his arms.  The murderer lived to be seventy-four years old, and his
crime was never suspected till he himself revealed it on his death-bed.
Domenico did actually die in Castagno's arms.  The death scene would have
been a good one for the latter to paint in oils.


September 1st.--Few things journalizable have happened during the last
month, because Florence and the neighborhood have lost their novelty; and
furthermore, I usually spend the whole day at home, having been engaged
in planning and sketching out a romance.  I have now done with this for
the present, and mean to employ the rest of the time we stay here chiefly
in revisiting the galleries, and seeing what remains to be seen in
Florence.

Last Saturday, August 28th, we went to take tea at Miss Blagden's, who
has a weekly reception on that evening.  We found Mr. Powers there, and
by and by Mr. Boott and Mr. Trollope came in.  Miss ------ has lately
been exercising her faculties as a spiritual writing-medium; and, the
conversation turning on that subject, Mr. Powers related some things that
he had witnessed through the agency of Mr. Home, who had held a session
or two at his house.  He described the apparition of two mysterious hands
from beneath a table round which the party were seated.  These hands
purported to belong to the aunt of the Countess Cotterel, who was
present, and were a pair of thin, delicate, aged, lady-like hands and
arms, appearing at the edge of the table, and terminating at the elbow in
a sort of white mist.  One of the hands took up a fan and began to use
it.  The countess then said, "Fan yourself as you used to do, dear aunt";
and forthwith the hands waved the fan back and forth in a peculiar
manner, which the countess recognized as the manner of her dead aunt.
The spirit was then requested to fan each member of the party; and
accordingly, each separate individual round the table was fanned in turn,
and felt the breeze sensibly upon his face.  Finally, the hands sank
beneath the table, I believe Mr. Powers said; but I am not quite sure
that they did not melt into the air.  During this apparition, Mr. Home
sat at the table, but not in such a position or within such distance that
he could have put out or managed the spectral hands; and of this Mr.
Powers satisfied himself by taking precisely the same position after the
party had retired.  Mr. Powers did not feel the hands at this time, but
he afterwards felt the touch of infant hands, which were at the time
invisible.  He told of many of the wonders, which seem to have as much
right to be set down as facts as anything else that depends on human
testimony.  For example, Mr. K------, one of the party, gave a sudden
start and exclamation.  He had felt on his knee a certain token, which
could have been given him only by a friend, long ago in his grave.  Mr.
Powers inquired what was the last thing that had been given as a present
to a deceased child; and suddenly both he and his wife felt a prick as of
some sharp instrument, on their knees.  The present had been a penknife.
I have forgotten other incidents quite as striking as these; but, with
the exception of the spirit-hands, they seemed to be akin to those that
have been produced by mesmerism, returning the inquirer's thoughts and
veiled recollections to himself, as answers to his queries.  The hands
are certainly an inexplicable phenomenon.  Of course, they are not
portions of a dead body, nor any other kind of substance; they are
impressions on the two senses, sight and touch, but how produced I cannot
tell.  Even admitting their appearance,--and certainly I do admit it as
freely and fully as if I had seen them myself,--there is no need of
supposing them to come from the world of departed spirits.

Powers seems to put entire faith in the verity of spiritual
communications, while acknowledging the difficulty of identifying spirits
as being what they pretend to be.  He is a Swedenborgian, and so far
prepared to put faith in many of these phenomena.  As for Home, Powers
gives a decided opinion that he is a knave, but thinks him so organized,
nevertheless, as to be a particularly good medium for spiritual
communications.  Spirits, I suppose, like earthly people, are obliged to
use such instruments as will answer their purposes; but rather than
receive a message from a dead friend through the organism of a rogue or
charlatan, methinks I would choose to wait till we meet.  But what most
astonishes me is the indifference with which I listen to these marvels.
They throw old ghost stories quite into the shade; they bring the whole
world of spirits down amongst us, visibly and audibly; they are
absolutely proved to be sober facts by evidence that would satisfy us of
any other alleged realities; and yet I cannot force my mind to interest
myself in them.  They are facts to my understanding, which, it might have
been anticipated, would have been the last to acknowledge them; but they
seem not to be facts to my intuitions and deeper perceptions.  My inner
soul does not in the least admit them; there is a mistake somewhere.  So
idle and empty do I feel these stories to be, that I hesitated long
whether or no to give up a few pages of this not very important journal
to the record of them.

We have had written communications through Miss ------ with several
spirits; my wife's father, mother, two brothers, and a sister, who died
long ago, in infancy; a certain Mary Hall, who announces herself as the
guardian spirit of Miss ------; and, queerest of all, a Mary Runnel, who
seems to be a wandering spirit, having relations with nobody, but thrusts
her finger into everybody's affairs.  My wife's mother is the principal
communicant; she expresses strong affection, and rejoices at the
opportunity of conversing with her daughter.  She often says very pretty
things; for instance, in a dissertation upon heavenly music; but there is
a lack of substance in her talk, a want of gripe, a delusive show, a
sentimental surface, with no bottom beneath it.  The same sort of thing
has struck me in all the poetry and prose that I have read from spiritual
sources.  I should judge that these effusions emanated from earthly
minds, but had undergone some process that had deprived them of solidity
and warmth.  In the communications between my wife and her mother, I
cannot help thinking that (Miss ------ being unconsciously in a mesmeric
state) all the responses are conveyed to her fingers from my wife's
mind. . . .

We have tried the spirits by various test questions, on every one of
which they have failed egregiously.  Here, however, the aforesaid Mary
Runnel comes into play.  The other spirits have told us that the veracity
of this spirit is not to be depended upon; and so, whenever it is
possible, poor Mary Runnel is thrust forward to bear the odium of every
mistake or falsehood.  They have avowed themselves responsible for all
statements signed by themselves, and have thereby brought themselves into
more than one inextricable dilemma; but it is very funny, where a
response or a matter of fact has not been thus certified, how invariably
Mary Runnel is made to assume the discredit of it, on its turning out to
be false.  It is the most ingenious arrangement that could possibly have
been contrived; and somehow or other, the pranks of this lying spirit
give a reality to the conversations which the more respectable ghosts
quite fail in imparting.

The whole matter seems to me a sort of dreaming awake.  It resembles a
dream, in that the whole material is, from the first, in the dreamer's
mind, though concealed at various depths below the surface; the dead
appear alive, as they always do in dreams; unexpected combinations occur,
as continually in dreams; the mind speaks through the various persons of
the drama, and sometimes astonishes itself with its own wit, wisdom, and
eloquence, as often in dreams; but, in both cases, the intellectual
manifestations are really of a very flimsy texture.  Mary Runnel is the
only personage who does not come evidently from dream-land; and she, I
think, represents that lurking scepticism, that sense of unreality, of
which we are often conscious, amid the most vivid phantasmagoria of a
dream.  I should be glad to believe in the genuineness of these spirits,
if I could; but the above is the conclusion to which my soberest thoughts
tend.  There remains, of course, a great deal for which I cannot account,
and I cannot sufficiently wonder at the pigheadedness both of
metaphysicians and physiologists, in not accepting the phenomena, so far
as to make them the subject of investigation.

In writing the communications, Miss ------ holds the pencil rather
loosely between her fingers; it moves rapidly, and with equal facility
whether she fixes her eyes on the paper or not.  The handwriting has far
more freedom than her own.  At the conclusion of a sentence, the pencil
lays itself down.  She sometimes has a perception of each word before it
is written; at other times, she is quite unconscious what is to come
next.  Her integrity is absolutely indubitable, and she herself totally
disbelieves in the spiritual authenticity of what is communicated through
her medium.


September 3d.--We walked into Florence yesterday, betimes after
breakfast, it being comfortably cool, and a gray, English sky; though,
indeed, the clouds had a tendency to mass themselves more than they do on
an overcast English day.  We found it warmer in Florence, but, not
inconveniently so, even in the sunniest streets and squares.

We went to the Uffizi gallery, the whole of which with its contents is
now familiar to us, except the room containing drawings; and our to-day's
visit was especially to them.  The door giving admittance to them is the
very last in the gallery; and the rooms, three in number, are, I should
judge, over the Loggia de' Lanzi, looking on the Grand Ducal Piazza.  The
drawings hang on the walls, framed and glazed; and number, perhaps, from
one to two hundred in each room; but this is only a small portion of the
collection, which amounts, it is said, to twenty thousand, and is
reposited in portfolios.  The sketches on the walls are changed, from
time to time, so as to exhibit all the most interesting ones in turn.
Their whole charm is artistic, imaginative, and intellectual, and in no
degree of the upholstery kind; their outward presentment being, in
general, a design hastily shadowed out, by means of colored crayons, on
tinted paper, or perhaps scratched rudely in pen and ink; or drawn in
pencil or charcoal, and half rubbed out; very rough things, indeed, in
many instances, and the more interesting on that account, because it
seems as if the artist had bestirred himself to catch the first glimpse
of an image that did but reveal itself and vanish.  The sheets, or
sometimes scraps of paper, on which they are drawn, are discolored with
age, creased, soiled; but yet you are magnetized by the hand of Raphael,
Michael Angelo, Leonardo, or whoever may have jotted down those
rough-looking master-touches.  They certainly possess a charm that is
lost in the finished picture; and I was more sensible of forecasting
thought, skill, and prophetic design, in these sketches than in the most
consummate works that have been elaborated from them.  There is something
more divine in these; for I suppose the first idea of a picture is real
inspiration, and all the subsequent elaboration of the master serves but
to cover up the celestial germ with something that belongs to himself.
At any rate, the first sketch is the more suggestive, and sets the
spectator's imagination at work; whereas the picture, if a good one,
leaves him nothing to do; if bad, it confuses, stupefies, disenchants,
and disheartens him.  First thoughts have an aroma and fragrance in them,
that they do not lose in three hundred years; for so old, and a good deal
more, are some of these sketches.

None interested me more than some drawings, on separate pieces of paper,
by Perugino, for his picture of the mother and friends of Jesus round his
dead body, now at the Pitti Palace.  The attendant figures are distinctly
made out, as if the Virgin, and John, and Mary Magdalen had each favored
the painter with a sitting; but the body of Jesus lies in the midst,
dimly hinted with a few pencil-marks.

There were several designs by Michael Angelo, none of which made much
impression on me; the most striking was a very ugly demon, afterwards
painted in the Sistine Chapel.  Raphael shows several sketches of
Madonnas,--one of which has flowered into the Grand Duke's especial
Madonna at the Pitti Palace, but with a different face.  His sketches
were mostly very rough in execution; but there were two or three designs
for frescos, I think, in the Vatican, very carefully executed; perhaps
because these works were mainly to be done by other hands than his own.
It seems to one that the Pre-Raphaelite artists made more careful
drawings than the later ones; and it rather surprised me to see how much
science they possessed.

We looked at few other things in the gallery; and, indeed, it was not one
of the days when works of art find me impressible.  We stopped a little
while in the Tribune, but the Venus de' Medici seemed to me to-day little
more than any other piece of yellowish white marble.  How strange that a
goddess should stand before us absolutely unrecognized, even when we know
by previous revelations that she is nothing short of divine!  It is also
strange that, unless when one feels the ideal charm of a statue, it
becomes one of the most tedious and irksome things in the world.  Either
it must be a celestial thing or an old lump of stone, dusty and
time-soiled, and tiring out your patience with eternally looking just the
same.  Once in a while you penetrate through the crust of the old
sameness, and see the statue forever new and immortally young.

Leaving the gallery we walked towards the Duomo, and on our way stopped
to look at the beautiful Gothic niches hollowed into the exterior walls
of the Church of San Michele.  They are now in the process of being
cleaned, and each niche is elaborately inlaid with precious marbles, and
some of them magnificently gilded; and they are all surmounted with
marble canopies as light and graceful as frost-work.  Within stand
statues, St. George, and many other saints, by Donatello and others, and
all taking a hold upon one's sympathies, even if they be not beautiful.
Classic statues escape you with their slippery beauty, as if they were
made of ice.  Rough and ugly things can be clutched.  This is nonsense,
and yet it means something. . . . The streets were thronged and
vociferative with more life and outcry than usual.  It must have been
market-day in Florence, for the commerce of the streets was in great
vigor, narrow tables being set out in them, and in the squares, burdened
with all kinds of small merchandise, such as cheap jewelry, glistening as
brightly as what we had just seen in the gem-room of the Uffizi; crockery
ware; toys, books, Italian and French; silks; slippers; old iron; all
advertised by the dealers with terribly loud and high voices, that
reverberated harshly from side to side of the narrow streets.  Italian
street-cries go through the head; not that they are so very sharp, but
exceedingly hard, like a blunt iron bar.

We stood at the base of the Campanile, and looked at the bas-reliefs
which wreathe it round; and, above them, a row of statues; and from
bottom to top a marvellous minuteness of inlaid marbles, filling up the
vast and beautiful design of this heaven-aspiring tower.  Looking upward
to its lofty summit,--where angels might alight, lapsing downward from
heaven, and gaze curiously at the bustle of men below,--I could not but
feel that there is a moral charm in this faithful minuteness of Gothic
architecture, filling up its outline with a million of beauti

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