As round the flickering household blaze
You sit and talk of vanished days,
Of parent, friend, no longer nigh,
And loves that in the churchyard lie,
And lips grow weak, and lids grow wet,
Then, then, I shall be with you yet,
Though I seem gone.
As the time drew nearer and nearer for leaving the Tuscan home where we had been so happy, Veronica began to manifest a certain solicitude, in consequence of our leisurely and unsystematic ways, lest we should have omitted to make Lamia acquainted with some cloister or bas-relief, some bit of quaint street architecture, or some hillside sanctuary, ignorance whereof might expose her to the reproach of a want of intelligent curiosity. But we found the omissions were few and unimportant, and this left us all the more free, during the now brief and regretful remainder of our sojourn, to pay farewell visits to the frescoes and altar-pieces, the monuments and statues, that had most engaged her affections. Where Giotto worked, where Savonarola preached, where Fra Angelico painted and prayed, where Michelangelo fought, where Dante sate, where Donatello slept, in death as in life not severed from his beloved Medicean patron, these and kindred spots had to be seen just once more. When one quits a place where one has been residing for some little time, one says good-bye to one’s friends; and these were, one and all, very dear friends to us, and we could not but take of them affectionate farewell. The Luca della Robbia in the Ospedale degli Innocenti, the Perugino in the Maddalena dei Pazzi, the Fountain by Verrocchio in the cortile of the Palazzo Vecchio, the recumbent Bishop in San Miniato, the Mino da Fiesole in the Badia, the bronze David in the Bargello;—but, unless I have a care, I shall fall into the fault I have been trying to avoid, of troubling you with a catalogue of familiar names. There were favourite spots, too, to drive to once again, happily too numerous to cite, and too lovely for any one to be so foolish as to attempt to describe. Exception, however, shall be made of one of these, for I fancy it is but little known, and therefore has not become hackneyed. Accident made us acquainted with it, and design had often and often taken us there again. It was in a podere some two miles or so outside the Porta San Niccolò, whence, over a wall lined with irises, one looks down the river immediately in front of one straight away to Florence, but sees nothing there save, through the feathery foliage of distant poplars, the cupola of the Duomo, Giotto’s campanile, and the Tower of the Palazzo Vecchio. Beyond, far beyond, are visible, on propitious days, the majestic peaks of the Carrara Mountains, and, a little farther towards the north, the snowy summits of the Apennines above Pistoia. It was a place that fascinated us, and we returned to it again and again. One evening, when the light was even exceptionally beautiful, but the air a little chill, and we had therefore, for Lamia’s sake, to curtail our enjoyment of it, I remember her exclaiming:
‘O, do let us stay. Even if it were deadly, it would be worth dying for. It may never be so beautiful again.’