The following year my grandfather lost his wife. She died at The Pines, at Weybridge, after a short illness, in the summer of 1858.
Two years later he was able to carry out his cherished hope of returning to Italy, and we went to Florence, where his daughter Emily had been living for some years. She welcomed us to the rooms she had secured in an old palace beyond the Arno—to the artistic Italian surroundings of which she had added something of the atmosphere of an English home.
His delight in the art and nature of Florence and its environs was intense, and the beauty of land and sky seems to make a fitting setting for the end of such a life as his.
He stood on the old jeweller's bridge, one autumn evening late in November, and watched the sun go down behind the western hill of the rushing Arno; and the sunset of his own life came soon after. Perhaps he had lingered too long gazing at this beautiful scene; for a chill, producing rapid bronchitis, took him from us on the 10th December 1861.
Towards the end, when he knew he was passing away, after other gentle loving words, almost his last were—with a sweet triumphant smile—"Draw up the blind and let me see the stars; for I still love the beauty."
Porta Pinti.
At the cemetery at Porta Pinti are some sombre gates with, over them, the words "Ils se reposent de leurs travaux, et leurs oeuvres les suivent." Those black gates opened one sunny December morning and showed a sloping avenue of marble tombs, tangles of pink and of white China roses in full flower falling over them, and at the end a tall white cross shining in the sunlight against the blue Italian sky,—fit type of the black gates of death, which had rolled back to let him pass into the Eternal Light beyond.