After nine months of experiment I bade the insular metropolis adieu, and returned no more. The Continent was close and beckoning; I heard the confusion of her tongues, and saw the shafts of her Gothic Babels probing the clouds, and for another year I roamed among her cities, as ardent and errant as when I went afield on my pony to win the spurs of a War Correspondent.
CHAPTER XXVII.
SPURS IN THE PICTURE GALLERIES.
Florence, city of my delight! how do I thrill at the recollection of the asylum afforded me by thee in the Via Parione. The room was tiled, and cool, and high, and its single window looked out upon a real palace, where the family of Corsini, presided over by a porter in cocked hat and an exuberance of gold lace, gave me frequent glimpses of gauze dresses and glorious eyes, whose owners sometimes came to the casement to watch the poor little foreigner, writing so industriously.
Every young traveller has two or three subjects of unrest. Mine were girls and art. The copyists in the galleries were more beautiful studies to me than the paintings. The next time I go to Europe, I shall take enough money along to give all the pretty ones an order; this will be an introduction, and I shall know how they live, and how much money they make, and what passions have heaved their beautiful bosoms, to make their slow, quiet lives forever haunted and longing.
Love, love! There are only two grand, unsatiated passions, which keep us forever in freshness and fever,—love and art.
In Italy I breathed the purest atmosphere; all the world was a landscape picture; all the skies were spilling blueness and crimson upon the mountains; all the faces were Madonnas; all the perspectives were storied architecture. Westward the star of Empire takes its way, but that of art shines steadily in the East. Thither look our American young men, no matter at which of its altars they make their devotions,—painting, sculpture, or architecture. And I, who had known some fondness for the pencil till lured into the wider, wilder field of letters, felt almost an artist's joy when I stood in the presence of those solemn masters whose works are inspired and imperishable, like religion.
Having passed the first thrill and disappointment,—for pure art speaks only to the pure by intuition or initiation, and I was yet a novice,—my old newspaper curiosity revived to learn of the successful living rather than of the grand dead.
Correspondents, like poets, are born, not made: the venerable associations around me—monuments, cloisters, palaces, the homes and graves of great men whom I revered, the aisles where every canvas bore a spell name—could not wean me from that old, reportorial habit of asking questions, peeping into private nooks, and making notes upon contemporary things, just as I had done for three years, in cities, on routes, on battle-fields. And as the old world seemed to me only a great art museum, I longed to look behind the tapestry at the Ghobelin weavers, pulling the beautiful threads.