Which, if they sung it as I heard it sung yesterday in the Cathedral of Siena, must have had an extremely soporific effect, lulling all others to sleep, and causing them to see beatific visions beyond all belief. I had in my boyhood a teacher named Professor Sears C. Walker, who was wont to tell how he had once heard in a rural New England village a church congregation sing:
“Before thy throne the angels bow-wow-wow-ow!”
But to hear the bow-wow in perfection, one must go to Rome. A pack in full cry or a chorus of owls is nothing to it. But let us pass on to a fresh story.
LEGENDS OF THE BOBOLI GARDENS: THE OLD GARDENER, AND THE TWO STATUES AND THE FAIRY
“He found such strange enchantment there,
In that garden sweet and rare,
Where night and day
The nightingales still sing their roundelay,
And plashing fountains ’neath the verdure play,
That for his life he could not thence away;
And even yet, though he hath long been dead,
’Tis said his spirit haunts the pleasant shade.”—The Ring of Charlemagne.
A great showman, as I have heard, once declared that in establishing a menagerie, one should have the indispensable lion, an obligato elephant, a requisite tiger, an essential camel, and imperative monkeys. One of the “indispensable lions” of Florence is the Boboli Gardens, joining the Pitti Palace, which, from their careful preservation in their original condition, give an admirable idea of what gardens were like in an age when far more was thought of them than now as places of habitual resort and enjoyment, and when they entered into all literature and life. Abraham à Santa Clara once wrote a discourse against gardens, as making life too happy or simple, basing his idea on the fact that sin originated in the Garden of Eden.
The Boboli Gardens were planned by Il Tribolo for Cosimo di Medici. The ground which they occupy is greatly varied, rising high in some places, from which very beautiful views of Florence, with its “walls and churches, palaces and towers,” may be seen. Of their
many attractions the guide-book remarks poetically in very nearly the following words:—
“Its long-embowered walks, like lengthened arbours,
Are well adapted to the summer’s sun;
While statues, terraces, and vases add
Still more unto its splendour. All around
We see attractive statues, and of these
A number really are restored antiques,
And many by good artists; best of all
Are four by mighty Michel Angelo,
Made for the second Julius, and meant
To decorate his tomb. You see them at
The angles of the grotto opposite
The entrance to the gardens. Of this grot
The famous Redi sang in verse grotesque:“Ye satyrs, in a trice
Leave your low jests and verses rough and hobbly,
And bring me a good fragment of the ice
Kept in the grotto of the Garden Boboli.
With nicks and picks
Of hammers and sticks,
Disintegrate it
And separate it,
Break it and split it,
Splinter and slit it!
Till at the end ’tis fairly ground and rolled
Into the finest powder, freezing cold.”
There are also, among the things worth seeing, the Venus by Giovanni of Boulogne (called di Bologna); the Apollo and Ceres by Baccio Bandinelli; the group of Paris carrying off Helen by V. de’ Rossi, and the old Roman fountain-bath and obelisk. The trees and flowers, shrubbery and boschetti, are charming; and if the reader often visits them, long sitting in the sylvan shade on sunny days, he will not fail to feel that strange enchantment which seems to haunt certain places, and people them with dreams, if not with elves.