There is the tenderness of remorse in the “least-loving mother’s” every mention of her slighted son—now “chapeled in the bye-way out of sight”—to wit,—sleepy little Ravenna.
Bianca Capello—fair, fond and false—lived in what is now a very shabby palace in Via Maggio, bearing the date, “1566.” Amerigo Vespucci was esteemed worthy of a tablet upon a building in the Borgo Ognissanti. Galileo’s house is near the Boboli Gardens, and, removed by a block or two, is the Museum of Natural Sciences, enshrining, as its gem, the Tribuna of Galileo, enriched by his portrait, his statue, paintings illustrative of his life, and instruments used by him in making mathematical and astronomical calculations. His tomb is in the church of S. Croce, almost covered with ascriptions to his learning, valuable scientific discoveries, etc., etc. Of tomb and epitaph the Infallible Mother is the affectionate warden, guarding them, it is to be presumed, as jealously as she once did the canon he was convicted of insulting. “The world moves,” and so must The Church, or be thrown off behind.
“Casa Guidi”! “Twixt church and palace of a Florence street!” From which the clear-eyed poetess bent to gaze upon the hosts who,—
“With accumulated heats,
And faces turned one way as if one fire
Both drew and flushed them, left their ancient beats
And went up toward the Palace-Pitti wall,”
on a day which “had noble use among God’s days!” How well we had known them, and the face that will look from them no more—while as yet the sea divided us from the land of her love and adoption!
Surely, never had poet more prosaic dwelling-place. Casa Guidi is a plain, four-story house, covered with yellowish stucco, lighted by formal rows of rectangular windows, without a morsel of moulding or the suspicion of an arch to relieve the tameness of the front elevation. It opens directly upon the sidewalk of as commonplace a street as Florence can show to the disappointed tourist. Yet we strolled often by it, lingeringly and lovingly; studied with thoughts, many and fond, the simple tablet between the first and second-story casements:
“Qui scrisse e mori Elisabetta Barrett Browning che in cuore di donna conciliava scienza di dotto e spirito di poeta, e del suo verso fece un aureo anello fra Italia e Inghilterra. Pone alla sua memoria Firenze grata, 1861.”