There seems to be that, however, in Bellosguardo which inspires every poet. Two of the most beautiful passages in English literature, one by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and another by Hawthorne, describe the views seen from it. The castle itself is deeply impressed on my memory, for during the past nine months I have never once raised my eyes from the table where I write without beholding it in full view before me across the Arno, even as I behold it now.
I cannot help observing that the mysterious sentiment which seized on the hero of this tale when he found his virgin relic, was marvellously like that which inspired Keats when he addressed his Ode to a Grecian Urn:
“Thou still unravished bride of quietness!
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
Sylvan historian who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape?”
That which I have here given is truly a leaf-fringed legend, for it is bordered with the petals of roses and embalmed with their perfume, and one which in the hands of a great master might have been made into a really beautiful poem. It came near a very gay rhymer at least in the Duke Lorenzo de’ Medici, whose songs, which were a little more than free, and rather more loose than easy, were the delight and disgrace of his time. And yet I cannot help rejoicing to meet this magnificent patron of art and letters at so late a day in a purely popular tale. There are men of beauty who are also a joy for ever, as well as things, and Lorenzo was one of them.
It is worth noting that just as the fairy in this tale reveals to Lorenzo that Florence is threatened by enemies, just so it happened that unto Saint Zenobio, standing rapt in divine contemplation in his cavern, it was announced that the same city was about to be assailed by cruel barbarians, who, as Sigbert relates in his Chronicle of 407 a.d., were the two hundred thousand Goths led by Radagasio into Italy. But they were soon driven away by the Saint’s prayers and penitence. It would be curious if one legend had here passed into another:
“So visions in a vision live again,
And dreams in dreams are wondrously transfused;
Gold turning into grey as clouds do change,
And shifting hues as they assume new forms.”
Apropos of Saint Zenobio of Florence, I will here give something which should have been included with the legend of the Croce al Trebbio, but which I obtained too late for that purpose. It would appear from the Iscrizioni e Memorie di Firenze, by F. Bigazzi (1887), that the pillar of the cross was really erected to commemorate a victory over heretics, but that the cross itself was added by the Saints Ambrosio and Zenobio, “on account of a great mystery”—which mystery is, I believe, fully explained by the legend which I have given. The inscription when complete was as follows:
sanctus ambrosius cum sancto zenobio propter grande misterium
hunc crucem hic locaverunt. et in mcccxxxviii noviter die
10 augusti reconsecrata est p. d. m. francisc. flor.
episcopum una cum aliis episcopis m.
A slightly different reading is given by Brocchi (Vite de’ Santi fiorentini, 1742).
“Of which saint, be it observed,” writes Flaxius, “that there is in England a very large and widely extended family, or stirps, named Snobs, who may claim that by affinity of name to Zenobio they are lineally or collaterally his descendants, even as the Potts profess connection with Pozzo del Borgo. But as it is said of this family or gens that they are famed for laying claim to every shadow of a shade of gentility, it may be that there is truly no Zenobility about them. Truly there are a great many more people in this world who are proud of their ancestors, than there ever were ancestors who would have been proud of them. The number of whom is as the sands of the sea, or as Heine says, ‘more correctly speaking, as the mud on the shore.’