I must stop before you all grow gray and wrinkled with groping so far back through the long night of ages past. But you will not soon forget the story of the boy king of Egypt.
[A CHILD IN FLORENCE.]
CHAPTER I.
WE lived in that same Casa Guidi from whose windows Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poet-eyes saw what she afterward put into glowing verse. Casa Guidi is a great pile of graystone, a pile of many windows which give upon the Via Maggio and a little piazza, as the squares in Florence are called. Consequently it is lighter and brighter than are many of the houses in Florence, where the streets are narrow and the houses lofty.
According to almost universal custom, Casa Guidi was divided into half a dozen different apartments, occupied by as many families. Ours was on the second floor, on the side of the house overlooking the piazza on which stood the church of San Felice. The pleasantest room in our apartment, as I thought, was a room in which I passed many hours of an ailing childhood; a room which I christened “The Gallery,” because it was long and narrow, and was hung with many cheerful pictures. It opened into a little boudoir at one end, and into the salon at the other. The walls of gallery and boudoir were frescoed gayly with fruits and flowers and birds.
Here the sun streamed in all through the long, mild, Florentine winters; here I would lie on my couch, and count the roses on the walls, and the birds, and the apricots, and listen to the cries in the streets; and, if a procession went by, hurry to the window and watch it pass, and stay at the window until I was tired, when I would totter back to my couch, and my day dreams, and my drawing, and my verse-making, and my attempts at studying.
I was fired with artist-ambitions at the age of ten; and what wonder, surrounded as I was by artists living and dead, and by their immortal works. It seemed to me then that one must put all one’s impressions of sight and form into shape. But I did not develop well. Noses proved a stumbling-block, which I never overcame, to my attaining to eminence in figure-sketching.