VIEW FROM PORTA PINTI, FLORENCE, 1861 [152]
INTRODUCTION.
RECOLLECTIONS OF MY GRANDFATHER.
My first recollection of my grandfather is of him in his study. As a little child my bed stood in his room, and when he got up, as he used to do in the early mornings, to write, he would take me in his arms, still fast asleep, carry me down-stairs to his study with him, and lay me on the sofa, wrapped in blankets which had been arranged for me overnight.
So when first I opened my eyes in the silent room I saw him there, a man of some fifty years, bending over a table covered with papers, the light of his shaded reading-lamp shining on his forehead and glancing down upon the papers as he leant over his writing, and the firelight flickering on the other parts of the room.
The silence and the earnestness seemed wonderful and beautiful. It was strange to watch him when he did not know it. It seemed to me, then, that he had been working so through the whole night, and that some great good which I could only dimly understand was to come of it.
My lying quiet, however, did not last long, for I knew the loving merry welcome I should have when, climbing—as I hoped and believed quite unperceived—up the back of his arm-chair, I should throw myself down into his lap with a loud cry of joy, and then we should have a famous game, until either he persuaded me to go back to my blankets to await a rational hour for getting up, or sent me up-stairs to be dressed. These two things—the intent, absorbed purpose, and the power of putting it aside to give himself up completely, with simple delight, to whatever he loved, whether to a child or to the beauty of nature—are the two that seem to me specially characteristic of him in all that later part of his life which comes within my remembrance.
Dr Southwood Smith and his grandchild Gertrude.