LAMIA’S WINTER-QUARTERS
I heard the Poet’s voice in the balcony, followed by the pushing back of heavy persiane, and then:
‘Lamia! Come as quickly as you can; I want to show you what you may never have a chance of seeing again.’
There was no reason why, if there was anything new or wonderful to behold, Lamia and the Poet should have a monopoly of the spectacle; so, arraying myself as rapidly as I could, I emerged onto the balcony just as Lamia, in incomplete but most fascinating attire, did the same.
‘Oh!’ she exclaimed. ‘What hills! What slopes! What villas! But where is Florence?’
‘Wait,’ said the Poet, ‘and you shall see. Like you, dear Lamia, she is very fair,’—how I wish I had the courage to address her in that fashion!—‘but, unlike you, she has not yet flowered out of the night.’
‘Neither have I, quite, I fear,’ she said, showing, when thuswise reminded, a quite unnecessary concern respecting her hastily-donned apparel.
‘She is veiled, absolutely veiled, as I have never seen her before, in a, shall I call it, peignoir of white mist, which conceals her utterly from sight. But look! she is beginning to disrobe her marble beauty.’
‘O, what is that, that surges through the mist?‘ ‘That is the noblest symbol of civic liberty in the world, the Tower of the Palazzo Vecchio.’
‘And that? And that?‘ ‘The topmost tier of Giotto’s Belfry, worthy, by its sublime simplicity, to serve for the type of all great Art; and, at its side in the rapidly-clearing ether, the cupola of the Duomo, that Michelangelo would not copy and could not better.‘Dome after dome, tower after tower, campanile after campanile, surged silently out of the mist; and, to use the Poet’s I hope not too familiar simile, the silvery folds of night sank downward to her feet, and Florence stood in naked loveliness before Lamia’s delighted gaze. Over the eastern hills came the bright vernal sun, every mountain slope broke into smiles and dimples, and in the last of its seaward valleys Arno glanced and gleamed with joy of the expanding dawn. Distance lends enchantment to the sound as well as to the view, and the clang and clash of innumerable belfries came modulated through the intervening air, wherefrom the last lingering trails of mist were gradually wizarded away.