SHORE OF THE MEDITERRANEAN—NICE—FUNERAL SERVICES OF MARIA THERESA, ARCHDUCHESS OF AUSTRIA—PRINCIPALITY OF MONACO—ROAD TO GENOA—SARDINIA—PRISON OF THE POPE—HOUSE OF COLUMBUS—GENOA.
The health-magistrate arrived at an early hour, on the morning of our departure from the lazaretto of Villa Franca. He was accompanied by a physician, who was to direct the fumigation. The iron pot was placed in the centre of the chamber, our clothes were spread out upon the beds, and the windows shut. Thechlorinsoon filled the room, and its detestable odor became so intolerable that we forced the door, and rushed past the sentinel into the open air, nearly suffocated. This farce over, we were permitted to embark, and, rounding the point, put into Nice.
The Mediterranean curves gracefully into the crescented shore of this lovely bay, and the high hills lean away from the skirts of the town in one unbroken slope of cultivation to the top. Large, handsome buildings face you on the long quay, as you approach; and white chimneys, and half-concealed parts of country-houses and suburban villas, appear through the olive and orange treeswith which the whole amphitheatre is covered. We landed amid a crowd of half-naked idlers, and were soon at a hotel, where we ordered the best breakfast the town would afford, and sat down once more to clean cloths and unrepulsive food.
As we rose from the table, a note, edged with black, and sealed and enveloped with considerable circumstance, was put into my hand by the master of the hotel. It was an invitation from the governor to attend a funeral service, to be performed in the cathedral that day, at ten o'clock, for the "late Queen-mother, Maria Theresa, Archduchess of Austria." Wondering not a little how I came by the honor, I joined the crowd flocking from all parts of the town to see the ceremony. The central door was guarded by a file of Sardinian soldiers; and, presenting my invitation to the officer on duty, I was handed over to the master of ceremonies, and shown to an excellent seat in the centre of the church. The windows were darkened, and the candles of the altar not yet lit; and, by the indistinct light that came in through the door, I could distinguish nothing clearly. A little silver bell tinkled presently from one of the side-chapels, and boys dressed in white appeared, with long tapers, and the house was soon splendidly illuminated. I found myself in the midst of a crowd of four or five hundred ladies, all in deep mourning. The church was hung from the floor to the roof in black cloth, ornamented gorgeously with silver; and, under the large dome, which occupied half the ceiling, was raised a pyramidal altar, with tripods supporting chalices for incense at the four corners, a walk round the lower base for the priests, and something in the centre, surrounded with a blaze of light, representing figures weeping over a tomb. The organ commenced pealing, there was a single beat on the drum, and aprocession entered. It was composed of the nobility of Nice, and the military and civil officers, all in uniform and court dresses. The gold and silver flashing in the light, the tall plumes of the Sardinian soldiery below, the solemn music, and the moving of the censers from the four corners of the altar, produced a very impressive effect. As soon as the procession had quite entered, the fire was kindled in the four chalices; and, as the white smoke rolled up to the roof, an anthem commenced with the full power of the organ. The singing was admirable, and there was one female voice in the choir, of singular power and sweetness.
The remainder of the service was the usual ceremonies of the Catholic church, and I amused myself with observing the people about me. It was little like a scene of mourning. The officers gradually edged in between the seats, and every woman with the least pretension to prettiness was engaged in anything but her prayers for the soul of the late Archduchess. Some of these, the very young girls, were pretty; and the women, of thirty-five or forty apparently, were fine-looking; but, except a decided air of style and rank, the fairly grown-up belles seemed to me of very small attraction.
I saw little else in Nice to interest me. I wandered about with my friend the surgeon, laughing at the ridiculous figures and villainous uniforms of the Sardinian infantry, and repelling the beggars, who radiated to us from every corner; and, having traversed the terrace of a mile on the tops of the houses next the sea, unravelled all the lanes of the old town, and admired all the splendor of the new, we dined and got early to bed, anxious to sleep once more between sheets, and prepare for an early start on the following morning.
We were on the road to Genoa with the first gray of the dawn: the surgeon, a French officer, and myself, three passengers of a courier barouche. We were climbing up mountains and sliding down with locked wheels for several hours, by a road edging on precipices, and overhung by tremendous rocks, and, descending at last to the sea-level, we enteredMentone, a town of the little principality ofMonaco. Having paid our twenty sous tribute to this prince of a territory not larger than a Kentucky farm, we were suffered to cross his borders once more into Sardinia, having posted through a whole State in less than half an hour.
It is impossible to conceive a route of more grandeur than the famous road along the Mediterranean from Nice to Genoa. It is near a hundred and fifty miles, over the edges of mountains bordering the sea for the whole distance. The road is cut into the sides of the precipice, often hundreds of feet perpendicular above the surf, descending sometimes into the ravines formed by the numerous rivers that cut their way to the sea, and mounting immediately again to the loftiest summits. It is a dizzy business, from beginning to end. There is no parapet, usually, and there are thousands of places where half a "shie" by a timid horse, would drop you at once some hundred fathoms upon rocks wet by the spray of every sea that breaks upon the shore. The loveliest little nests of valleys lie between that can be conceived. You will see a green spot, miles below you in turning the face of a rock; and right in the midst, like a handful of plaster models on a carpet, a cluster of houses, lying quietly in the warm southern exposure, embosomed in everything refreshing to the eye, the mountain sides cultivated in a large circle around, and the ruins of an old castle to a certainty on the eminence above. You descend and descend, and wind into the curves of the shore,losing and regaining sight of it constantly, till, entering a gate on the sea-level, you find yourself in a filthy, narrow, half-whitewashed town, with a population of beggars, priests, and soldiers; not a respectable citizen to be seen from one end to the other, nor a clean woman, nor a decent house. It is so, all through Sardinia. The towns from a distance lie in the most exquisitely-chosen spots possible. A river comes down from the hills and washes the wall; the uplands above are always of the very choicest shelter and exposure. You would think man and nature had conspired to complete its convenience and beauty; yet, within, all is misery, dirt, and superstition. Every corner has a cross—every bench a priest, idling in the sun—every door a picture of the Virgin. You are delighted to emerge once more, and get up a mountain to the fresh air.
As we got farther on toward Genoa, the valleys became longer by the sea, and the road ran through gardens, down to the very beach, of great richness and beauty. It was new to me to travel for hours among groves of orange and lemon trees, laden with both fruit and flower, the ground beneath covered with the windfalls, like an American apple-orchard. I never saw such a profusion of fruit. The trees were breaking under the rich yellow clusters. Among other things, there were hundreds of tall palms, spreading out their broad fans in the sun, apparently perfectly strong and at home under this warm sky. They are cultivated as ornaments for the churches on sacred days.
I caught some half dozen views on the way that I shall never get out of my memory. At one place particularly, I think near Fenale, we ran round the corner of a precipice by a road cut right into the face of a rock, two hundred feet at least above the sea; and a long view burst upon us at once of a sweet greenvalley, stretching back into the mountains as far as the eye could go, with three or four small towns, with their white churches, just checkering the broad sweeps of verdure, a rapid river winding through its bosom, and a back ground of the Piedmontese Alps, with clouds half-way up their sides, and snow glittering in the sun on their summits. Language cannot describe these scenes. It is but a repetition of epithets to attempt it. You must come and see them to feel how much one loses to live always at home, andreadof such things only.
Thecourierpointed out to us the place in which Napoleon imprisoned the Pope of Rome—a low house, surrounded with a wall close upon the sea—and the house a few miles from Genoa, believed to have been that of Columbus.
We entered Genoa an hour after sunrise, by a noble gate, placed at the western extremity of the crescented harbor. Thence to the centre of the city was one continued succession of sumptuous palaces. We drove rapidly along the smooth, beautifully paved streets, and my astonishment was unbroken till we were set down at the hotel. Congratulating ourselves on the hindrances which had conspired to bring us here against our will, we took coffee, and went to bed for a few hours, fatigued with a journey more wearisome to the body than the mind.
I have spent two days in merely wandering about Genoa, looking at the exterior of the city. It is a group of hills, piledwith princely palaces. I scarce know how to commence a description of it. If there were but one of these splendid edifices, or if I could isolate a single palace, and describe it to you minutely, it would be easy to convey an impression of the surprise and pleasure of a stranger in Genoa. The whole city, to use the expression of a French guide-book, "respire la magnificence"—breathes of splendor! The grand street, in which most of the palaces stand, winds around the foot of a high hill; and the gardens and terraces are piled back, with palaces above them; and gardens, and terraces, and palaces still above these; forming, wherever you can catch a vista, the most exquisite rising perspective. On the summit of this hill stands the noble fortress of St. George; and behind it a lovely open garden, just now alive with millions of roses, a fountain playing into a deep oval basin in the centre, and a view beneath and beyond of a broad winding valley, covered with the country villas of the nobility and gentry, and blooming with all the luxuriant vegetation of a southern clime.
My window looks out upon the bay, across which I see the palace ofAndria Doria, the great winner of the best glory of the Genoese; and just under me floats an American flag, at the peak of a Baltimore schooner, that sails to-morrow morning for the United States. I must close my letter, to send by her. I shall remain in Genoa a week, and will write you of its splendor more minutely.
FLORENCE—THE GALLERY—THE VENUS DE MEDICIS—THE TRIBUNE—THE FORNARINA—THE CASCINE—AN ITALIAN FESTA—MADAME CATALANI.
Florence.—It is among the pleasantest things in this very pleasant world, to find oneself for the first time in a famous city. We sallied from the hotel this morning an hour after our arrival, and stopped at the first corner to debate where we should go. I could not help smiling at the magnificence of the alternatives. "To the Gallery, of course," said I, "to see the Venus de Medicis." "To Santa Croce," said one, "to see the tombs of Michael Angelo, and Alfieri, and Machiavelli." "To the Palazzo Pitti," said another, "the Grand Duke's palace, and the choicest collection of pictures in the world." The embarrassment alone was quite a sensation.
The Venus carried the day. We crossed the Piazza de Granduca, and inquired for the gallery. A fine court was shown us, opening out from the square, around the three sides of which stood a fine uniform structure, with a colonnade, the lower story occupied by shops and crowded with people. We mounted abroad staircase, and requested of the soldier at the door to be directed to the presence of the Venus, without delay. Passing through one of the long wings of the gallery, without even a glance at the statues, pictures, and bronzes that lined the walls, we arrived at the door of a cabinet, and, putting aside the large crimson curtain at the entrance, stood before the enchantress. I must defer a description of her. We spent an hour there, but, except that her divine beauty filled and satisfied my eye, as nothing else ever did, and that the statue is as unlike a thing to the casts one sees of it as one thing could well be unlike another, I made no criticism. There is an atmosphere of fame and circumstantial interest about the Venus, which bewilders the fancy almost as much as her loveliness does the eye. She has been gazed upon and admired by troops of pilgrims, each of whom it were worth half a life to have met at her pedestal. The painters, the poets, the talent and beauty, that have come there from every country under the sun, and the single feeling of love and admiration that she has breathed alike into all, consecrate her mere presence as a place for revery and speculation. Childe Harold has been here, I thought, and Shelley and Wordsworth and Moore; and, farther removed from our sympathies, but interesting still, the poets and sculptors of another age, Michael Angelo and Alfieri, the men of genius of all nations and times; and, to stand in the same spot, and experience the same feeling with them, is an imaginative pleasure, it is true, but as truly a deep and real one. Exceeding, as the Venus does beyond all competition, every image of loveliness painted or sculptured that one has ever before seen, the fancy leaves the eye gazing upon it, and busies itself irresistibly with its pregnant atmosphere of recollections. At least I found it so, and I must go there againand again, before I can look at the marble separately, and with a merely admiring attention.
Three or four days have stolen away, I scarce know how. I have seen but one or two things, yet have felt so unequal to the description, that but for my promise I should never write a line about them. Really, to sit down and gaze into one of Titian's faces for an hour, and then to go away and dream of putting into language its color and expression, seems to me little short of superlative madness. I only wonder at the divine faculty of sight. The draught of pleasure seems to me immortal, and the eye the only Ganymede that can carry the cup steadily to the mind. How shall I begin to give you an idea of the Fornarina? What can I tell you of the St. John in the desert, that can afford you a glimpse, even, of Raphael's inspired creations?
TheTribuneis the name of a small octagonal cabinet in the gallery, devoted to the masterpieces of the collection. There are five statues, of which one is the Venus de Medicis; and a dozen or twenty pictures, of which I have only seen as yet Titian's two Venuses, and Raphael's St. John and Fornarina. People walk through the other parts of the gallery, and pause here and there a moment before a painting or a statue; but in the Tribune they sit down, and you may wait hours before a chair is vacated, or often before the occupant shows a sign of life. Everybody seems entranced there. They get before a picture, and bury their eyes in it, as if it had turned them to stone. After the Venus, the Fornarina strikes me most forcibly, and I have stood and gazedat it till my limbs were numb with the motionless posture. There is no affectation in this. I saw an English girl yesterday gazing at the St. John. She was a flighty, coquettish-looking creature, and I had felt that the spirit of the place was profaned by the way she sailed into the room. She sat down, with half a glance at the Venus, and began to look at this picture. It is a glorious thing, to be sure, a youth of apparently seventeen, with a leopard-skin about his loins, in the very pride of maturing manliness and beauty. The expression of the face is all human, but wrought to the very limit of celestial enthusiasm. The wonderful richness of the coloring, the exquisite ripe fulness of the limbs, the passionate devotion of the kindling features, combine to make it the faultless ideal of a perfect human being in youth. I had quite forgotten the intruder, for an hour. Quite a different picture had absorbed all my attention. The entrance of some one disturbed me, and as I looked around I caught a glance of my coquette, sitting with her hands awkwardly clasped over her guide-book, her mouth open, and the lower jaw hanging down with a ludicrous expression of unconsciousness and astonished admiration. She was evidently unaware of everything in the world except the form before her, and a more absorbed and sincere wonder I never witnessed.
I have been enjoying all day an Italian Festa. The Florentines have a pleasant custom of celebrating this particular festival, Ascension-day, in the open air; breakfasting, dining, and dancing under the superb trees of the Cascine. This is, by the way, quite the loveliest public pleasure-ground I ever saw—a wood of three miles in circumference, lying on the banks of the Arno, just below the town; not, like most European promenades, a bare field of clay or ground, set out with stunted trees, and cutinto rectangular walks, or without a secluded spot or an untrodden blade of grass; but full of sward-paths, green and embowered, the underbrush growing wild and luxuriant between; ivy and vines of all descriptions hanging from the limbs, and winding about every trunk; and here and there a splendid opening of velvet grass for half a mile, with an ornamental temple in the centre, and beautiful contrivances of perspective in every direction. I have been not a little surprised with the enchantment of so public a place. You step into the woods from the very pavement of one of the most populous streets in Florence; from dust and noise and a crowd of busy people to scenes where Boccacio might have fitly laid his "hundred tales of love." The river skirts the Cascine on one side, and the extensive grounds of a young Russian nobleman's villa on the other; and here at sunset come all the world to walk and drive, and on festas like this, to encamp, and keep holy-day under the trees. The whole place is more like a half-redeemed wild-wood in America, than a public promenade in Europe.
It is the custom, I am told, for the Grand Duke and the nobles of Tuscany to join in this festival, and breakfast in the open air with the people. The late death of the young and beautiful Grand-Duchess has prevented it this year, and the merry-makings are diminished of one half their interest. I should not have imagined it, however, without the information. I took a long stroll among the tents this morning, with two ladies from Albany, old friends, whom I have encountered accidentally in Florence. The scenes were peculiar and perfectly Italian. Everything was done fantastically and tastefully. The tables were set about the knolls, the bonnets and shawls hung upon the trees, and thedark-eyed men and girls, with their expressive faces full of enjoyment, leaned around upon the grass, with the children playing among them, in innumerable little parties, dispersed as if it had been managed by a painter. At every few steps a long embowered alley stretched off to the right or left, with strolling groups scattered as far as the eye could see under the trees, the red ribands and bright colored costumes contrasting gayly with the foliage of every tint, from the dusky leaf of the olive to the bright soft green of the acacia. Wherever there was a circular opening there were tents just in the edges of the wood, the white festoons of the cloth hung from the limbs, and tables spread under them, with their antique-looking Tuscan pitchers wreathed with vines, and tables spread with broad green leaves, making the prettiest cool covering that could be conceived. I have not come up to the reality in this description, and yet, on reading it, it sounds half a fiction. One must be here to feel how little language can convey an idea of this "garden of the world."
The evening was the fashionable hour, and, with the addition of Mr. Greenough, the sculptor, to our party, we drove to the Cascine about an hour before sunset to see the equipages, and enjoy the close of the festival. The drives intersect these beautiful grounds irregularly in every direction, and the spectacle was even more brilliant than in the morning. The nobility and the gay world of Florence flew past us, in their showy carriages of every description, the distinguished occupants differing in but one respect from well-bred people of other countries—they looked happy. If I had been lying on the grass, an Italian peasant, with my kinsmen and friends, I should not have felt that among the hundreds who were rolling past me, richer and better born.there was one face that looked on me contemptuously or condescendingly. I was very much struck with the universal air of enjoyment and natural exhilaration. One scarce felt like a stranger in such a happy-looking crowd.
Near the centre of the grounds is an open space, where it is the custom for people to stop in driving to exchange courtesies with their friends. It is a kind of fashionable open airsoirée. Every evening you may see from fifty to a hundred carriages at a time, moving about in this little square in the midst of the woods, and drawing up side by side, one after another, for conversation. Gentlemen come ordinarily on horseback, and pass round from carriage to carriage, with their hats off, talking gayly with the ladies within. There could not be a more brilliant scene, and there never was a more delightful custom. It keeps alive the intercourse in the summer months, when there are no parties, and it gives a stranger an opportunity of seeing the lovely and the distinguished without the difficulty and restraint of an introduction to society. I wish some of these better habits of Europe were imitated in our country as readily as worse ones.
After threading the embowered roads of the Cascine for an hour, and gazing with constant delight at the thousand pictures of beauty and happiness that met us at every turn, we came back and mingled in the gay throng of carriages at the centre. Thevaletof our lady-friends knew everybody, and, taking a convenient stand, we amused ourselves for an hour, gazing at them as they were named in passing. Among others, several of the Bonaparte family went by in a splendid barouche; and a heavy carriage, with a showy, tasselled hammer-cloth, and servants in dashy liveries, stopped just at our side, containingMadame Catalani, the celebrated singer. She has a fine face yet, with large expressive features, and dark, handsome eyes. Her daughter was with her, but she has none of her mother's pretensions to good looks.
THE PITTI PALACE—TITIAN'S BELLA—AN IMPROVISATRICE—VIEW FROM A WINDOW—ANNUAL EXPENSE OF RESIDENCE AT FLORENCE.
I have got into the "back-stairs interest," as the politicians say, and to-day I wound up the staircase of thePitti Palace, and spent an hour or two in its glorious halls with the younger Greenough, without the insufferable and usually inevitable annoyance of acicerone. You will not of course, expect a regular description of such a vast labyrinth of splendor. I could not give it to you even if I had been there the hundred times that I intend to go, if I live long enough in Florence. In other galleries you see merely the Arts, here you are dazzled with the renewed and costly magnificence of a royal palace. The floors and ceilings and furniture, each particular part of which it must have cost the education of a life to accomplish, bewilder you out of yourself, quite; and, till you can tread on a matchless pavement or imitated mosaic, and lay your hat on a table of inlaid gems, and sit on a sofa wrought with you know not what delicateand curious workmanship, without nervousness or compunction, you are not in a state to appreciate the pictures upon the walls with judgment or pleasure.
I saw but one thing well—Titian'sBella, as the Florentines call it. There are two famous Venuses by the same master, as you know, in the other gallery, hanging over the Venus de Medicis—full-length figures reclining upon couches, one of them usually called Titian's mistress. TheBellain the Pitti gallery, is a half-length portrait, dressed to the shoulders, and a different kind of picture altogether. The others are voluptuous, full-grown women. This represents a young girl of perhaps seventeen; and if the frame in which it hangs were a window, and the loveliest creature that ever trod the floors of a palace stood looking out upon you, in the open air, she could not seem more real, or give you a stronger feeling of the presence of exquisite, breathing, human beauty. The face has no particular character. It is the look with which a girl would walk to the casement in a mood of listless happiness, and gaze out, she scarce knew why. You feel that it is the habitual expression. Yet, with all its subdued quiet and sweetness, it is a countenance beneath which evidently sleeps warm and measureless passion, capacities for loving and enduring and resenting everything that makes up a character to revere and adore. I do not know how a picture can express so much—but it does express all this, and eloquently too.
In a fresco on the ceiling of one of the private chambers, is a portrait of the late lamented Grand-duchess. On the mantelpiece in the Duke's cabinet also is a beautiful marble bust of her. It is a face and head corresponding perfectly to the character given her by common report, full of nobleness and kindness. TheDuke, who loved her with a devotion rarely found in marriages of state, is inconsolable since her death, and has shut himself from all society. He hardly slept during her illness, watching by her bedside constantly. She was a religious enthusiast, and her health is said to have been first impaired by too rigid an adherence to the fasts of the church, and self-inflicted penance. The Florentines talk of her still, and she appears to have been unusually loved and honored.
I have just returned from hearing animprovisatrice. At a party last night I met an Italian gentleman, who talked very enthusiastically of a lady of Florence, celebrated for her talent of improvisation. She was to give a private exhibition to her friends the next day at twelve, and he offered politely to introduce me. He called this morning, and we went together.
Some thirty or forty people were assembled in a handsome room, darkened tastefully by heavy curtains. They were sitting in perfect silence when we entered, all gazing intently on the improvisatrice, a lady of some forty or fifty years, of a fine countenance, and dressed in deep mourning. She rose to receive us; and my friend introducing me, to my infinite dismay, as animprovisatore Americano, she gave me a seat on the sofa at her right hand, an honor I had not Italian enough to decline. I regretted it the less that it gave me an opportunity of observing the effects of the "fine phrensy," a pleasure I should otherwise certainly have lost through the darkness of the room.
We were sitting in profound silence, the head of the improvisatrice bent down upon her breast, and her hands clasped overher lap, when she suddenly raised herself, and with both hands extended, commenced in a thrilling voice, "Patria!" Some particular passage of Florentine history had been given her by one of the company, and we had interrupted her in the midst of her conception. She went on with astonishing fluency, in smooth harmonious rhyme, without the hesitation of a breath, for half an hour. My knowledge of the language was too imperfect to judge of the finish of the style, but the Italians present were quite carried away with their enthusiasm. There was an improvisatore in company, said to be the second in Italy; a young man, of perhaps twenty-five, with a face that struck me as the verybeau idealof genius. His large expressive eyes kindled as the poetess went on, and the changes of his countenance soon attracted the attention of the company. She closed and sunk back upon her seat, quite exhausted; and the poet, looking round for sympathy, loaded her with praises in the peculiarly beautiful epithets of the Italian language. I regarded her more closely as she sat by me. Her profile was beautiful; and her mouth, which at the first glance had exhibited marks of age, was curled by her excitement into a firm, animated curve, which restored twenty years at least by its expression.
After a few minutes one of the company went out of the room, and wrote upon a sheet of paper the last words of every line for a sonnet; and a gentleman who had remained within, gave a subject to fill it up. She took the paper, and looking at it a moment or two, repeated the sonnet as fluently as if it had been written out before her. Several other subjects were then given her, and she filled the same sonnet with the same terminations. It was wonderful. I could not conceive of such facility. After she had satisfied them with this, she turned to me and said, thatin compliment to the American improvisatore she would give an ode upon America. To disclaim the character and the honor would have been both difficult and embarrassing even for one who knew the language better than I, so I bowed and submitted. She began with the discovery of Columbus, claimed him as her countryman; and with some poetical fancies about the wild woods and the Indians, mingled up Montezuma and Washington rather promiscuously, and closed with a really beautiful apostrophe to liberty. My acknowledgments were fortunately lost in the general murmur.
A tragedy succeeded, in which she sustained four characters. This, by the working of her forehead and the agitation of her breast, gave her more trouble, but her fluency was unimpeded; and when she closed, the company was in raptures. Her gestures were more passionate in this performance, but, even with my imperfect knowledge of the language, they always seemed called for and in taste. Her friends rose as she sunk back on the sofa, gathered round her, and took her hands, overwhelming her with praises. It was a very exciting scene altogether, and I went away with new ideas of poetical power and enthusiasm.
One lodges like a prince in Florence, and pays like a beggar. For the information of artists and scholars desirous to come abroad, to whom exact knowledge on the subject is important, I will give you the inventory and cost of my whereabout.
I sit at this moment in a window of what was formerly the archbishop's palace—a noble old edifice, with vast staircases and resounding arches, and a hall in which you might put a dozen ofthe modern brick houses of our country. My chamber is as large as a ball-room, on the second story, looking out upon the garden belonging to the house, which extends to the eastern wall of the city. Beyond this lies one of the sweetest views in the world—the ascending amphitheatre of hills, in whose lap lies Florence, with the tall eminence ofFiesoléin the centre, crowned with the monastery in which Milton passed six weeks, while gathering scenery for his Paradise. I can almost count the panes of glass in the windows of the bard's room; and, between the fine old building and my eye, on the slope of the hill, lie thirty or forty splendid villas, half-buried in trees (Madame Catalani's among them), piled one above another on the steep ascent, with their columns and porticoes, as if they were mock temples in a vast terraced garden. I do not think there is a window in Italy that commands more points of beauty. Cole, the American landscape painter, who occupied the room before me, took a sketch from it. For neighbors, the Neapolitan ambassador lives on the same floor, the two Greenoughs in the ground-rooms below, and the palace of one of the wealthiest nobles of Florence overlooks the garden, with a front of eighty-five windows, from which you are at liberty to select any two or three, and imagine the most celebrated beauty of Tuscany behind the crimson curtains—the daughter of this same noble bearing that reputation. She was pointed out to me at the Opera a night or two since, and I have seen as famous women with less pretensions.
For the interior, my furniture is not quite upon the same scale, but I have a clean snow-white bed, a calico-covered sofa, chairs and tables enough, and pictures three deep from the wall to the floor.
For all this, and the liberty of the episcopal garden, I paythree dollars a month! A dollar more is charged for lamps, boots, and service, and a dark-eyed landlady of thirty-five mends my gloves, and pays me two visits a day—items not mentioned in the bill. Then for the feeding, an excellent breakfast of coffee and toast is brought me for six cents; and, without wine, one may dine heartily at a fashionable restaurant for twelve cents, and with wine, quite magnificently for twenty-five. Exclusive of postage and pleasures, this is all one is called upon to spend in Florence. Three hundred dollars a year would fairly and largely cover the expenses of a man living at this rate; and a man who would not be willing to live half as well for the sake of his art, does not deserve to see Italy. I have stated these unsentimental particulars, because it is a kind of information I believe much wanted. I should have come to Italy years ago if I had known as much, and I am sure there are young men in our country, dreaming of this paradise of art in half despair, who will thank me for it, and take up at once "the pilgrim's sandal-shoon and scollop-shell."
EXCURSION TO VENICE—AMERICAN ARTISTS—VALLEY OF FLORENCE—MOUNTAINS OF CARRARA—TRAVELLING COMPANIONS—HIGHLAND TAVERN—MIST AND SUNSHINE—ITALIAN VALLEYS—VIEW OF THE ADRIATIC—BORDER OF ROMAGNA—SUBJECTS FOR THE PENCIL—HIGHLAND ITALIANS—ROMANTIC SCENERY—A PAINFUL OCCURRENCE—AN ITALIAN HUSBAND—A DUTCHMAN, HIS WIFE AND CHILDREN—BOLOGNE—THE PILGRIM—MODEL FOR A MAGDALEN.
I started for Venice yesterday, in company with Mr. Alexander and Mr. Cranch, two American artists. We had taken the vetturino for Bologna, and at daylight we were winding up the side of the amphitheatre of Appenines that bends over Florence, leaving Fiesolé rising sharply on our right. The mist was creeping up the mountain just in advance of us, retreating with a scarcely perceptible motion to the summits, like the lift of a heavy curtain; Florence, and its long, heavenly valley, full of white palaces sparkling in the sun, lay below us, more like a vision of a better world than a scene of human passion; away in the horizon the abrupt heads of the mountains of Carrara roseinto the sky; and with the cool, fresh breeze of the hills, and the excitement of the pleasant excursion before us, we were three of as happy travellers probably as were to be met on any highway in this garden of the world.
We had six companions, and a motley crew they were—a little effeminate Venetian, probably a tailor, with a large, noble-looking, handsome contadina for a wife; a sputtering Dutch merchant, a fine, little, coarse, good-natured fellow, withhiswife, and two very small and very disagreeable children; an Austrian corporal in full uniform; and a fellow in a straw hat, speaking some unknown language, and a nondescript in every respect. The women and children, and my friends, the artists, were my companions inside, the double dicky in front accommodating the others. Conversation commenced with the journey. The Dutch spoke their dissonant language to each other, and French to us, the contadina's soft Venetian dialect broke in like a flute in a chorus of harsh instruments, and our own hissing English added to a mixture already sufficiently various.
We were all day ascending mountains, and slept coolly under three or four blankets at a highland tavern, on a very wild Appenine. Our supper was gaily eaten, and our mirth served to entertain five or six English families, whose chambers were only separated from the rough raftered dining hall by double curtains. It was pleasant to hear the children and nurses speaking English unseen. The contrast made us realize forcibly the eminently foreign scene about us. The next morning, after travelling two or three hours in a thick, drizzling mist, we descended a sharp hill, and emerged at its foot into a sunshine so sudden and clear, that it seemed almost as if the night had burst into mid-day in a moment. We had come out of a black cloud.The mountain behind us was capped with it to the summit. Beneath us lay a map of a hundred valleys, all bathed and glowing in unclouded light, and on the limit of the horizon, far off as the eye could span, lay a long sparkling line of water, like a silver frame around the landscape. It was our first view of theAdriatic. We looked at it with the singular and indefinable emotion with which one always sees a celebratedwaterfor the first time—a sensation, it seems to me, which is like that of no other addition to our knowledge. The Mediterranean at Marseilles, the Arno at Florence, the Seine at Paris, affected me in the same way. Explain it who will, or can!
An hour after, we reached the border ofRomagna, the dominions of the Pope running up thus far into the Appenines. Here our trunks were taken off and searched more minutely. The little village was full of the dark-skinned, romantic-looking Romagnese, and my two friends, seated on a wall, with a dozen curious gazers about them, sketched the heads looking from the old stone windows, beggars, buildings, and scenery, in a mood of professional contentment. Dress apart, these highland Italians are like North American Indians—the same copper complexions, high cheek bones, thin lips, and dead, black hair. The old women particularly, would pass in any of our towns for full-blooded squaws.
The scenery, after this, grew of the kind "which savage Rosa dashed"—the only landscape I ever sawexactlyof the tints so peculiar to Salvator's pictures. Our painters were in ecstasies with it, and truly, the dark foliage, and blanched rocks, the wild glens, and wind-distorted trees, gave the country the air of a home for all the tempests and floods of a continent. The Kaatskills are tame to it.
The forenoon came on, hot and sultry, and our little republic began to display its character. The tailor's wife was taken sick; and fatigue, and heat, and the rough motion of the vetturino in descending the mountains, brought on a degree of suffering which it was painful to witness. She was a woman of really extraordinary beauty, and dignified and modest as few women are in any country. Her suppressed groans, her white, tremulous lips, the tears of agony pressing thickly through her shut eyelids, and the clenching of her sculpture-like hands, would have moved anything but an Italian husband. The little effeminate villain treated her as if she had been a dog. She bore everything from him till he took her hand, which she raised faintly to intimate that she could not rise when the carriage stopped, and threw it back into her face with a curse. She roused, and looked at him with a natural majesty and calmness that made my blood thrill. "Aspetta?" was her only answer, as she sunk back and fainted.
The Dutchman's wife was a plain, honest, affectionate creature, bearing the humors of two heated and ill-tempered children, with a patience we were compelled to admire. Her husband smoked and laughed, and talked villainous French and worse Italian, but was glad to escape to the cabriolet in the hottest of the day, leaving his wife to her cares. The baby screamed, and the child blubbered and fretted, and for hours the mother was a miracle of kindness. The "drop too much," came in the shape of a new crying fit from both children, and the poor little Dutchwoman, quite wearied out, burst into a flood of tears, and hiccupped her complaints in her own language, weeping unrestrainedly for a quarter of an hour. After this she felt better, took a gulp of wine from the black bottle, and settled herself once more quietly and resignedly to her duties. We had certainly openedone or two very fresh veins of human character, when we stopped at the gates.
There is but one hotel for American travellers in Bologna, of course. Those who have read Rogers's Italy, will remember his mention of "The Pilgrim," the house where the poet met Lord Byron by appointment, and passed the evening with him which he describes so exquisitely. We took leave of our motley friends at the door, and our artists who had greatly admired the lovely Venetian, parted from her with the regret of old acquaintances. She certainly was, as they said, a splendid model for a Magdalen, "majestical and sad," and, always in attitudes for a picture: sleeping or waking, she afforded a succession of studies of which they took the most enthusiastic advantage.
EXCURSION TO VENICE CONTINUED—BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF BOLOGNA—GALLERY OF THE FINE ARTS—RAPHAEL'S ST. CECILIA—PICTURES OF CARRACCI—DOMENICHINOS' MADONNA DEL ROSARIO—GUIDO'S MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS—THE CATHEDRAL AND THE DUOMO—EFFECTS OF THESE PLACES OF WORSHIP, AND THE CEREMONIES, UPON THE MIND—RESORT OF THE ITALIAN PEASANTRY—OPEN CHURCHES—SUBTERRANEAN-CONFESSION CHAPEL—THE FESTA—GRAND PROCESSIONS—ILLUMINATIONS—AUSTRIAN BANDS OF MUSIC—DEPORTMENT OF THE PEOPLE TO A STRANGER.
Another evening is here, and my friends have crept to bed with the exclamation, "how much we may live in a day." Bologna is unlike any other city we have ever seen, in a multitude of things. You walk all over it under arcades, sheltered on either side from the sun, the elegance and ornament of the lines of pillars depending on the wealth of the owner of the particular house, but columns and arches, simple or rich, everywhere. Imagine porticoes built on the front of every house in Philadelphia or New York, so as to cover the sidewalks completely, and,down the long perspective of every street, continued lines of airy Corinthian, or simple Doric pillars, and you may faintly conceive the impression of the streets of Bologna. With Lord Byron's desire to forget everything English, I do not wonder at his selection of this foreign city for a residence, so emphatically unlike, as it is, to everything else in the world.
We inquired out the gallery after breakfast, and spent two or three hours among the celebrated master-pieces of theCarracci, and the famous painters of the Bolognese school. The collection is small, but said to be more choice than any other in Italy. There certainly are five or six among its forty or fifty gems, that deserve each a pilgrimage. The pride of the place is the St. Cecilia, by Raphael. This always beautiful personification of music, a woman of celestial beauty, stands in the midst of a choir who have been interrupted in their anthem by a song, issuing from a vision of angels in a cloud from heaven. They have dropped their instruments, broken, upon the ground, and are listening with rapt attention, all, except the saint, with heads dropped upon their bosoms, overcome with the glory of the revelation. She alone, with her harp hanging loosely from her fingers, gazes up with the most serene and cloudless rapture beaming from her countenance, yet with a look of full and angelic comprehension, and understanding of the melody and its divine meaning. You feel that her beauty is mortal, for it is all woman; but you see that, for the moment, the spirit that breathes through, and mingles with the harmony in the sky, is seraphic and immortal. If there ever was inspiration, out of holy writ, it touched the pencil of Raphael.
It is tedious to read descriptions of pictures. I liked everything in the gallery. The Bolognese style of color suits my eye.It is rich and forcible, without startling or offending. Its delicious mellowness of color, and vigor and triumphant power of conception, show two separate triumphs of the art, which in the same hand are delightful. The pictures of Ludovico Carracci especially fired my admiration. And Domenichino, who died of a broken heart at Rome, because his productions were neglected, is a painter who always touches me nearly. HisMadonna del Rosariois crowded with beauty. Such children I never saw in painting—the very ideals of infantile grace and innocence. It is said of him, that, after painting his admirable frescoes in the church of St. Andrew, at Rome, which, at the time, were ridiculed unsparingly by the artists, he used to walk in on his return from his studio, and gazing at them with a dejected air, remark to his friend, that he "could not think they werequiteso bad—theymighthave been worse." How true it is, that, "the root of a great name is in the dead body."
Guido's celebrated picture of the "Massacre of the Innocents," hangs just opposite the St. Cecilia. It is a powerful and painful thing. The marvel of it to me is the simplicity with which its wonderful effects are produced, both of expression and color. The kneeling mother in the foreground, with her dead children before her, is the most intense representation of agony I ever saw. Yet the face is calm, her eyes thrown up to heaven, but her lips undistorted, and the muscles of her face, steeped as they are in suffering, still and natural. It is the look of a soul overwhelmed—that has ceased to struggle because it is full. Her gaze is on heaven, and in the abandonment of her limbs, and the deep, but calm agony of her countenance, you see that nothing between this and heaven can move her more. One suffers in seeing suchpictures. You go away exhausted, and with feelings harassed and excited.
As we returned, we passed the gates of the university. On the walls were pasted a sonnet printed with some flourish, in honor ofCamillo Rosalpina, the laureate of one of the academical classes.
We visited several of the churches in the afternoon. The cathedral and the Duomo are glorious places—both. I wish I could convey, to minds accustomed to the diminutive size and proportions of our churches in America, an idea of the enormous and often almost supernatural grandeur of those in Italy. Aisles in whose distance the figure of a man is almost lost—pillars, whose bases you walk round in wonder, stretching into the lofty vaults of the roof, as if they ended in the sky—arches of gigantic dimensions, mingling and meeting with the fine tracery of a cobweb—altars piled up on every side with gold, and marble, and silver—private chapels ornamented with the wealth of nobles, let into the sides, each large enough for a communion—and through the whole extent of the interior, an unencumbered breadth of floor, with here and there a solitary worshipper on his knees, or prostrated on his face—figures so small in comparison with the immense dome above them, that it seems as if, could distance drown a prayer, they were as much lost as if they prayed under the open sky! Without having even a leaning to the Catholic faith, I love to haunt their churches, and I am not sure that the religious awe of the sublime ceremonies and places of worship does not steal upon me daily. Whenever I am heated, or fatigued, or out of spirits, I go into the first cathedral, and sit down for an hour. They are always dark, and cool, and quiet; and the distant tinkling of the bell from some distant chapel andthe grateful odor of the incense, and the low, just audible murmur of prayer, settles on my feelings like a mist, and softens and soothes and refreshes me, as nothing else will. The Italian peasantry who come to the cities to sell or bargain, pass their noons in these cool places. You see them on their knees asleep against a pillar, or sitting in a corner, with their heads upon their bosoms; and, if it were as a place of retreat and silence alone, the churches are an inestimable blessing to them. It seems to me, that any sincere Christian, of whatever faith, would find a pleasure in going into a sacred place and sitting down in the heat of the day, to be quiet and devotional for an hour. It would promote the objects of any denomination in our country, I should think, if the churches were thus left always open.
Under the cathedral of Bologna is asubterranean confession-chapel—as singular and impressive a device as I ever saw. It is dark like a cellar, the daylight faintly struggling through a painted window above the altar, and the two solitary wax candles giving a most ghastly intensity to the gloom. The floor is paved with tombstones, the inscriptions and death's heads of which you feel under your feet as you walk through. The roof is so vaulted that every tread is reverberated endlessly in hollow tones. All around are the confession-boxes, with the pierced plates, at which the priest within puts his ear, worn with the lips of penitents, and at one of the sides is a deep cave, far within which, as in a tomb, lies a representation on limestone of our Saviour, bleeding as he came from the cross, with the apostles, made of the same cadaverous material, hanging over him!
We have happened, by a fortunate chance, upon an extraordinary day in Bologna—afesta, that occurs but once in ten years. We went out as usual after breakfast this morning, and found the city had been decorated over-night in the most splendid and singular manner. The arcades of some four or five streets in the centre of the town were covered with rich crimson damask, the pillars completely bound, and the arches dressed and festooned with a degree of gorgeousness and taste as costly as it was magnificent. The streets themselves were covered with cloths stretched above the second stories of the houses from one side to the other, keeping off the sun entirely, and making in each street one long tent of a mile or more, with two lines of crimson columns at the sides, and festoons of gauze, of different colors, hung from window to window in every direction. It was by far the most splendid scene I ever saw. The people were all there in their gayest dresses, and we probably saw in the course of the day every woman in Bologna. My friends, the painters, give it the palm for beauty over all the cities they had seen. There was a grand procession in the morning, and in the afternoon the bands of the Austrian army made the round of the decorated streets, playing most delightfully before the principal houses. In the evening there was an illumination, and we wandered up and down till midnight through the fairy scene, almost literally "dazzled and drunk with beauty."
The people of Bologna have a kind of earnest yet haughty courtesy, very different from that of most of the Italians I have seen. They bow to the stranger, as he enters thecafé; and if they rise before him, the men raise their hats and the ladies smile and curtsy as they go out; yet without the least familiarity which could authorize farther approach to acquaintance. Wehave found the officers, whom we meet at the eating-houses, particularly courteous. There is something delightful in this universal acknowledgment of a stranger's claims on courtesy and kindness. I could well wish it substituted in our country, for the surly and selfish manners of people in public-houses to each other. There is neither loss of dignity nor committal of acquaintance in such attentions; and the manner in which a gentleman steps forward to assist you in any difficulty of explanation in a foreign tongue, or sends the waiter to you if you are neglected, or hands you the newspaper or his snuff-box, or rises to give you room in a crowded place, takes away, from me at least, all that painful sense of solitude and neglect one feels as a stranger in a foreign land.
We go to Ferrara to-morrow, and thence by the Po to Venice. My letter must close for the present.
VENICE—THE FESTA—GONDOLIERS—WOMEN—AN ITALIAN SUNSET—THE LANDING—PRISONS OF THE DUCAL PALACE—THE CELLS DESCRIBED BY BYRON—APARTMENT IN WHICH PRISONERS WERE STRANGLED—DUNGEONS UNDER THE CANAL—SECRET GUILLOTINE—STATE CRIMINALS—BRIDGE OF SIGHS—PASSAGE TO THE INQUISITION AND TO DEATH—CHURCH OF ST. MARC—A NOBLEMAN IN POVERTY, ETC., ETC.
You will excuse me at present from a description of Venice. It is a matter not to be hastily undertaken. It has also been already done a thousand times; and I have just seen a beautiful sketch of it in the public prints of the United States. I proceed with my letters.
The Venetianfestais a gay affair, as you may imagine. If not so beautiful and fanciful as the revels by moonlight, it was more satisfactory, for we could see and be seen, those important circumstances to one's individual share in the amusement. At four o'clock in the afternoon, the links of the long bridge of boats across the Giudecca were cut away, and the broad canal left clear for a mile up and down. It was covered in a fewminutes with gondolas, and all the gayety and fashion of Venice fell into the broad promenade between the city and the festal island. I should think five hundred were quite within the number of gondolas. You can scarcely fancy the novelty and agreeableness of this singular promenade. It was busy work for the eyes to the right and left, with the great proportion of beauty, and the rapid glide of their fairy-like boats. And thequietnessof the thing was so delightful—no crowding, no dust, no noise but the dash of oars and the ring of merry voices; and we sat so luxuriously upon our deep cushions the while, threading the busy crowd rapidly and silently, without a jar or touch of anything but the yielding element that sustained us.
Two boats soon appeared with wreaths upon their prows, and these had won the first and second prizes at the last year'sregatta. The private gondolas fell away from the middle of the canal, and left them free space for a trial of their speed. They were the most airy things I ever saw afloat, about forty feet long, and as slender and light as they could well be, and hold together. Each boat had six oars, and the crews stood with their faces to the beak of their craft; slight, but muscular men, and with a skill and quickness at their oars which I had never conceived. I realized the truth and the force of Cooper's inimitable description of the race in the Bravo. The whole of his book gives you the very air and spirit of Venice, and one thanks him constantly for the lively interest which he has thrown over everything in this bewitching city. The races of the rival boats to-day were not a regular part of thefesta, and were not regularly contested. The gondoliers were exhibiting themselves merely, and the people soon ceased to be interested in them.
We rowed up and down till dark, following here and there theboats whose freights attracted us, and exclaiming every moment at some new glimpse of beauty. There is really a surprising proportion of loveliness in Venice. The women are all large, probably from never walking, and other indolent habits consequent upon want of exercise; and an oriental air, sleepy and passionate, is characteristic of the whole race. One feels that he has come among an entirely new class of women, and hence, probably, the far-famed fascination of Venice to foreigners.
The sunset happened to be one of those so peculiar to Italy, and which are richer and more enchanting in Venice than in any other part of it, from the character of its scenery. It was a sunset without a cloud; but at the horizon the sky was dyed of a deep orange, which softened away toward the zenith almost imperceptibly, the whole west like a wall of burning gold. The mingled softness and splendor of these skies is indescribable. Everything is touched with the same hue. A mild, yellow glow is all over the canals and buildings. The air seems filled with glittering golden dust, and the lines of the architecture, and the outlines of the distant islands, and the whole landscape about you is mellowed and enriched with a new and glorious light. I have seen one or two such sunsets in America; but there the sunsets are bolder and clearer, and with much more sublimity—they have rarely the voluptuous coloring of those in Italy.
It was delightful to glide along over a sea of light so richly tinted, among those graceful gondolas, with their freights of gayety and beauty. As the glow on the sky began to fade, they all turned their prows toward San Marc, and dropping into a slower motion, the whole procession moved on together to the stairs of the piazzetta; and by the time the twilight was perceptible, thecaféswere crowded, and the square was like onegreatféte. We passed the evening in wandering up and down, never for an instant feeling like strangers, and excited and amused till long after midnight.
After several days' delay, we received an answer this morning from the authorities, with permission to see the bridge of sighs, and the prisons of the ducal palace. We landed at the broad stairs, and passing the desolate court, with its marble pillars and statues green with damp and neglect, ascended the "giant's steps," and found the warder waiting for us, with his enormous keys, at the door of a private passage. At the bottom of a staircase we entered a close gallery, from which the first range of cells opened. The doors were broken down, and the guide holding his torch in them for a moment in passing, showed us the same dismal interior in each—a mere cave, in which you would hardly think it possible to breathe, with a raised platform for a bed, and a small hole in the front wall to admit food and what air could find its way through from the narrow passage. There were eight of these; and descending another flight of damp steps, we came to a second range, differing only from the first in their slimy dampness. These are the cells of which Lord Byron gives a description in the notes to the fourth canto of Childe Harold. He has transcribed, if you remember, the inscription from the ceilings and walls of one which was occupied successively by the victims of the Inquisition. The letters are cut rudely enough, and must have been done entirely by feeling, as there is no possibility of the penetration of a ray of light. I copied them with some difficulty, forgetting that they were in print, and, comparing them afterward with my copy of Childe Harold, I found them exactly the same, and I refer you, therefore, to his notes.
In a range of cells still below these, and almost suffocatingfrom their closeness, one was shown us in which prisoners were strangled. The rope was passed through an iron grating of four bars, the executioner standing outside the cell. The prisoner within sat upon a stone, with his back to the grating, and the cord was passed round his neck, and drawn till he was choked. The wall of the cell was covered with blood, which had spattered against it with some violence. The guide explained it by saying, that owing to the narrowness of the passage the executioner had no room to draw the cord, and to expedite his business his assistant at the same time plunged a dagger into the neck of the victim. The blood had flowed widely over the wall, and ran to the floor in streams. With the darkness of the place, the difficulty I found in breathing, and the frightful reality of the scenes before me, I never had in my life a comparable sensation of horror.
At the end of the passage a door was walled up. It led, in the times of the republic, to dungeons under the canal, in which the prisoner died in eight days from his incarceration, at the farthest, from the noisome dampness and unwholesome vapors of the place. The guide gave us a harrowing description of the swelling of their bodies, and the various agonies of their slow death. I hurried away from the place with a sickness at my heart. In returning by the same way I passed the turning, and stumbled over a raised stone across the passage. It was the groove of a secret guillotine. Here many of the state and inquisition victims were put to death in the darkness of a narrow passage, shut out even in their last moment from the light and breath of heaven. The frame of the instrument had been taken away; but the pits in the wall, which had sustained the axe, werestill there; and the sink on the other side, where the head fell, to carry off the blood. And these shocking executions took place directly before the cells of the other prisoners, within twenty feet from the farthest. In a cell close to this guillotine had been confined a state criminal for sixteen years. He was released at last by the arrival of the French, and on coming to the light in the square of San Marc was struck blind, and died in a few days. In another cell we stopped to look at the attempts of a prisoner upon its walls, interrupted, happily, by his release. He had sawed several inches into the front wall, with some miserable instrument, probably a nail. He had afterward abandoned this, and had, with prodigious strength, taken up a block from the floor; and, the guide assured us, had descended into the cell below. It was curious to look around his pent prison, and see the patient labor of years upon those rough walls, and imagine the workings of the human mind in such a miserable lapse of existence.
We ascended to the light again, and the guide led us to a massive door, with two locks, secured by heavy iron bars. It swung open with a scream, and we mounted a winding stair, and
"Stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs."
Two windows of close grating looked on either side upon the long canal below, and let in the only light to the covered passage. It is a gloomy place within, beautifully as its light arch hangs in the air from without. It was easy to employ the imagination as we stood on the stone where Childe Harold had stood before us, and conjured up in fancy the despair and agony that must have been pressed into the last glance at light and life that hadbeen sent through those barred windows. Across this bridge the condemned were brought to receive their sentence in the Chamber of theTen, or to be confronted with bloody inquisitors, and then were led back over it to die. The last light that ever gladdened their eyes came through those close bars, and the gay Giudecca in the distance, with its lively waters covered with boats, must have made that farewell glance to a Venetian bitter indeed. The side next the prison is now massively walled up. We stayed, silently musing at the windows, till the old cicerone ventured to remind us that his time was precious.
Ordering the gondola round to the stairs of the piazetta, we strolled for the first time into the church of San Marc. The four famous bronze horses stood with their dilated nostrils and fine action over the porch, bringing back to us Andrea Doria, and his threat; and as I remembered the ruined palace of the old admiral at Genoa, and glanced at the Austrian soldier upon guard, in the very shadow of the winged lion, I could not but feel most impressively the moral of the contrast. The lesson was not attractive enough, however, to keep us in a burning sun, and we put aside the heavy folds of the drapery and entered. How deliciously cool are these churches in Italy! We walked slowly up toward the distant altar. An old man rose from the base of one of the pillars, and put out his hand for charity. It is an incident that meets one at every step, and with half a glance at his face I passed on. I was looking at the rich mosaic on the roof, but his features lingered in my mind. They grew upon me still more strongly; and as I became aware of the full expression of misery and pride upon them, I turned about to see what had become of him. My two friends had done each the very same thing, with the same feeling of regret, and were talking of theold man when I came back to them. We went to the door, and looked all about the square, but he was no where to be seen. It is singular that he should have made the same impression upon all of us, of an old Venetian nobleman in poverty. Slight as my glance was, the noble expression of sadness about his fine white head and strong features, are still indelible in my memory. The prophecy which Byron puts into the mouth of the condemned Doge, is still true in every particular:—