CHAPTER III.

ONE summer we lived in a villa a short distance outside the gates of Florence. For Florence had gates in those days, and was a walled city, kept by Austrian sentinels. That was the time of the Austrian occupation. Since then, Solferino and Magenta have been fought, and the treaty of Villa-franca has been signed, and now, “Italy’s one, from mountain to sea!”—

“King Victor has Italy’s crown on his head,

And his flag takes all heaven with its white, green and red.”

But then the Florentines bowed their necks under a hated foreign yoke, scowling when they dared at a retreating “maledetto Tedesco” (cursed German).

The phrase “white, green and red” recalls to me the fire-balloons we used to send up from our villa garden, on the summer nights of long ago. We had, for our Italian tutor, an enthusiastic patriot, who had fought in the Italian ranks in ’48, and who was looking forward to shouldering a musket soon again. It afforded him intense gratification to send the national colors floating out over Florence. Our villa was built on a hill-side, commanding a fine view of the Val d’Arno, and of the City of Flowers herself, domed, campaniled, spired. The longer the voyages made by our balloons, the higher rose the spirits of our Signor Vicenzo. He regarded these airy nothings, made by his own hands, of tissue paper and alcohol, as omens of good or ill to his beloved country.

I suppose he was a fair type of his countrymen, intensely dramatic, with a native facility of expression. One notices this facility of expression among all classes. The Italians have an eloquent sign-language of their own, in which they are as proficient as in the language of spoken words. It is charming to see two neighbors communicating with each other across the street, without uttering a syllable, by the means of animated gestures. It seems a natural sequence that they should be a people of artists.

Such long rambles as my sisters and I and our maid Assunta took, starting from the villa! Assunta was the daughter of a neighboring countryman of the better sort, who cultivated a grape vineyard and an olive field, besides keeping a dairy. We had a way of happening by in the evening in time for a glass of warm milk. Assunta’s mother supplied our table with milk and butter daily, moreover; butter made into tiny pats and done up daintily in grape leaves, never salted, by the way; milk put up in flasks cased in straw, such as are also used for the native wine. Was it the unfailing appetite of childhood, or was that milk and butter really superior to any I have ever tasted since? What charming breakfasts recur to me! Semele, as we called our baker’s rolls; a golden circle of butter on its own leaf; great figs bursting with juicy sweetness; milk.

How good those figs used to taste for lunch, too, when we would pay a few crazis for the privilege of helping ourselves to them off the fig-trees in some podere (orchard, vineyard), inclosed in its own stone wall, on which scarlet poppies waved in the golden sunlight, beneath the blue, blue skies. Am I waxing descriptive and dull? Well, dear girls, I wish you could have shared those days with me. Roaming about those hill-sides, my sisters and I peopled them with the creatures of our own imaginations, as well as those of other people’s imaginations, to say nothing of veritable historical characters. We read and re-read Roger’s Italy. Do you know that enchanting book? Can you say by heart, as Millie, Eva and I could, “Ginevra,” and “Luigi,” and “The Brides of Venice”? I wonder if I should like that poetry now? I loved it then. Also, I date my knowledge of Byron to that same epoch. We children devoured the descriptions in “Childe Harold,” and absorbed “The Two Foscari,” which otherwise we would perhaps have never read. Byron was the poet of our fathers and mothers; but in these early days dramatic and narrative poetry was more intelligible than the mysticism of Tennyson and the Brownings, so enchanting to me now.

One evening, some friends who occupied a neighboring villa invited mamma to be present at the reading of a manuscript poem by an American poet, Buchanan Read. I was permitted to go, too, and was fully alive to the dignity of the occasion. Mr. Read was making a reputation rapidly; there was no telling what might be in store for him. The generous hand of brother artists in Florence all cheered him on his way, and accorded to him precisely that kind of sympathetic encouragement which his peculiar nature required. The group of interested, friendly faces in the salon at Villa Allori rises up before me as I write, on the evening when Mr. Read, occupying a central position, read aloud, in his charming, trained voice.

I remember that, in the pauses of the reading, Mr. Powers, who was present, amused one or two children about him by drawing odd little caricatures on a stray bit of note paper, which is, by the way, still in my possession. Doubtless Mr. Powers’ reputation rests upon his statues, not his caricatures; yet these particular ones have an immense value for me, dashed off with a twinkle in the artist’s beautiful dark eyes.

There was also present on this occasion a beautiful young lady, for whom Mr. Read had just written some birthday verses, which he read to us, after having completed the reading of the larger manuscript. Those birthday verses have haunted me ever since, and this, although I cannot recall a word of the more ambitious poem.

Mr. Powers had lived for so many years in Florence that he was by right of that, if by no other right, the patriarch of the American colony there. He and his large family were most intensely American, in spite of their long expatriation. His was emphatically an American home, as completely so as though the Arno and the Appenines had been, instead, the Mississippi and the Alleghanies. This was no doubt due to the fact that Mrs. Powers was preëminently an American wife and mother, large-hearted and warm-hearted. She never forgot the household traditions of her youth. She baked mince-pies and pumpkin-pies at Christmas and Thanksgiving, and dispensed these bounties to her countrymen with a lavish hand. Then, too, the Powers lived in a house, and not in an apartment, or, as we say, on a flat. The children ran up and down-stairs, and in and out their own yard, which lay between the dwelling-house and the studio, just as American children do. And in this genial, wholesome home an artist grew up in the second generation. A son of Mr. Powers is now making name and fame for himself in his father’s profession.

GOING TO THE PARTY.

It has been said that the beautiful face of the eldest daughter of this family is suggested in her father’s “Greek Slave.” I looked up to her then with the respect which a child feels for an elder girl, “a young lady in society.” I can appreciate now and admire, even more than I did then, the extreme simplicity and unconsciousness which so well accorded with her grand, classic beauty. She was the good fairy at a Christmas Tree Festival, to which all the American girls and boys in Florence were bidden, on the twenty-fifth of December. We were all presented with most exquisitely made bonbonnieres, chiefly of home manufacture. We were feasted on doughnuts which brought tears to some of our eyes; dear American doughnuts, that might have been fried in the land of the free. We had French candy ad libitum; but there was also on exhibition a pound or so of genuine American stick candy, such as we see by the bushel in this country, and which had been brought over from the United States by a friend recently arrived, at Mrs. Powers’ special request. We examined this stick candy with patriotic enthusiasm. We ate little bits of it, and thought it infinitely better than our candied fruits and chocolate creams. Doubtless this little incident here recalled will account for the fact that I always associate peppermint stick candy with the flag of the Union. It is an unfortunate caprice of mind; but, nevertheless, the national stripes always rise before me when I see these red and white sticks.

I am inclined to the belief that exiles make the best patriots. We American children stood up fiercely for our own native land, whenever the question as to national superiority arose between ourselves and English, French, or Italian children,—especially the English. With these we fought the Revolutionary war all over again, hotly, if injudiciously. And I am confident that we had a personal and individual sense of superiority over them. No doubt we were endowed, even at that early age, with the proverbial national conceit. Some one had told me that every American was a sovereign, and that I was consequently a princess in my own right. This became a conviction with me, and greatly increased my self-importance. How glorious to be the citizen of a country of such magnificent gifts of citizenship!

AT THE PARTY.

But to return to Mr. Powers. His statue of California was on exhibition at this time. This is, to my mind, the most noble and impressive of his works. The strong, resolute face, of classic outlines, and of the sterner type of beauty, bears a distinct resemblance to the sculptor’s second daughter, although by no means a portrait. It has been told me that one of the fathers of our American church, traveling in Italy, suggested an important alteration in this statue. California originally carried in her hand a bar, supposed to represent a bar of solid gold. The idea occurred to the bishop that were this smooth bar—which might mean anything—made to represent a nugget of gold in the rough, the point of the story would be far more effectively told; and on this idea the bishop spoke. The sculptor was impressed directly, and with all the unaffected simplicity of real genius he thanked his critic for the hint. California now displays her symbolic nugget; and, moreover, about her head is designed a fillet of bits of ore in the rough.

The America of Powers is another impressive and beautiful female form. A vision of the sculptor comes before my eyes, standing in front of this statue, and talking it over with a party of visitors. Such a beautiful, simple-mannered man—with his mild dark eyes and serene face! He wore the usual blouse and linen apron, and the cap of the sculptor. He held his chisel in his hand as he conversed. Some of his audience did not agree with him in the peculiar political views he held. But Mr. Powers would not argue, and what need? Had he not preached his sermon in stone, and eloquently?

CHEERFUL WORDS.[B]

In the whole range of English literature we can call to mind the works of no single author to which the title, “Cheerful Words,” can more properly apply than to those of George Macdonald. It exactly expresses the element which permeates everything from his pen, whether sermon, essay, story or poem—an element which strengthens while it cheers, which instills new light and life into the doubting or discouraged soul, and incites it to fresh effort.

In the volume before us the editor has brought together, with a careful and judicious hand, some of the choicest passages from Macdonald’s works, written in various keys and upon various subjects, but all marked by healthy sentiment and sunshiny feeling. In quoting what a late critic has said of the “electrical consciousness” which characterizes his writings, the editor remarks: “The breadth and manliness of tone and sentiment, the deep perceptions of human nature, the originality, fancy and pathos, the fresh, out-of-door atmosphere everywhere apparent; above all, the earnest, wholesome, but always unobtrusive religious teaching that underlies all his writings, give to the works of George Macdonald a certain magnetic power that is indescribable.” And in the selections here made that power is singularly apparent. By turns they touch the heart, fire the imagination, moisten the eyes, arouse the sympathies, and bring into active exercise the better feelings and instincts of mind and heart.

The introduction to the volume is from the pen of James T. Fields, a personal friend and ardent admirer of the author. He regards Macdonald as a master of his art, and believes in holding up for admiration those like him, who have borne witness to the eternal beauty and cheerful capabilities of the universe around us, and who are lovingly reminding us, whenever they write, of the “holiness of helpfulness.”

FOOTNOTE:

[B] Cheerful Words. By George Macdonald. Introduction by James T. Fields, and Biography by Emma E. Brown. Spare Minute Series. Boston D. Lothrop & Co. Price $1.00.

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Transcriber’s Notes:

Obvious punctuation errors repaired.

SEEING THE POPE:

“Generalissmoi” changed to “Generalissimo” (Generalissimo to the Pope)

“Bacca” changed to “Bocca” (corner of Bocca di Leone)

“underpinnngs” changed to “underpinnings” (shaky in its underpinnings)

THE CHILDREN OF THE KOPPENBERG:

“Mindem” changed to “Minden” (to Hildesheim, or Minden, or Nienburg)

SHETLAND PONIES:

“mistess” changed to “mistress” (when the mistress sees)

MARKET DAY AT PAU:

“Pyrenees” changed to “Pyrénées” (of France, the Basses-Pyrénées)

IL SANTISSIMO BAMBINO:

“Tiberias” changed to “Tiberius” (steps where Tiberius Gracchus)

“loñg” changed to “long” (that for a long time, annually)

THE JEWELLED TOMB:

“Kohi-noor” changed to “Koh-i-noor” (owner of the Koh-i-noor)

THE BOY KING OF EGYPT:

“Urœus” changed to “Uræus” (having the Uræus, or Asp)

“momuments” changed to “monuments” (time the monuments give)