I can now ask for a bath in Italian, and order the necessary things for myself in the hotel: also say "come in" and "thank you." But just the few days of that very German table d'hôte at Lucerne, where I talked gladly to polish myself up, have given my tongue a hybrid way of talking without thinking: and I say "ja, ja," and "nein," and "der, die, das," as often as not before such Italian nouns as I have yet captured. To fall upon a chambermaid who knows French is like coming upon my native tongue suddenly.
Give me good news of your foot and all that is above it: I am so doubtful of its being really strong yet; and its willing spirits will overcome it some day and do it an injury, and hurt my feelings dreadfully at the same time.
Walk only on one leg whenever you think of me! I tell you truly I am wonderfully little lonely: and yet my thoughts are constantly away with you, wishing, wishing,—what no word on paper can ever carry to you. It shall be at our next meeting!—All yours.
LETTER XXXII.
My Dearest: Florence is still eating up all my time and energies: I promised you there should be austerity and self-denial in the matter of letter-writing: and I know you are unselfish enough to expect even less than I send you.
Girls in the street address compliments to Arthur's complexion:—"beautiful brown boy" they call him: and he simmers over with vanity, and wishes he could show them his boating arms, brown up to the shoulder, as well. Have you noticed that combination in some of the dearest specimens of young English manhood,—great physical vanity and great mental modesty? and each as transparently sincere as the other.
The Bargello is an ideal museum for the storage of the best things out of the Middle Ages. It opens out of splendid courtyards and staircases, and ranges through rooms which have quite a feudal gloom about them; most of these are hung with bad late tapestries (too late at least for my taste), so that the gloom is welcome and charming, making even "Gobelins" quite bearable. I find quite a new man here to admire—Pollaiolo, both painter and sculptor, one of the school of "passionate anatomists," as I call them, about the time of Botticelli, I fancy. He has one bust of a young Florentine which equals Verocchio on the same ground, and charms me even more. Some of his subjects are done twice over, in paint and bronze: but he is more really a sculptor, I think, and merely paints his piece into a picture from its best point of view.