(“Here wrote and died Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who combined with a woman’s heart, the science of the savant and the mind of the poet, and by her verse formed a golden link between Italy and England. Erected to her memory by grateful Florence. 1861.”)
This is a free English translation, but it does not—it cannot, being English—say to ear and soul what the musical flow of the original conveys.
She is buried in that part of grateful Florence known as the English Cemetery. It is smaller than that in Rome, and not comparable to it in loveliness or interest. We coveted for the woman and the poet a corner of the old Aurelian wall beside Shelley instead of the small plot of the main alley of this village of the dead;—Keats’ coverlet of violets rather than the marble sarcophagus, with a pillared base, set hard and flat upon her grave. One panel bears her medallion profile in basso-rilievo, and the initials “E. B. B., 1861.” There was no need to write more. We would have been better satisfied with less—marble! Buttercups and daisies pressed over the closed, cold mouth of the tomb, and a tea-rose tree at the head had strewed it with blushing petals.
Florence is the acknowledged Queen of Modern Art and gives lessons in the same to all civilization. Yet this English Burial-ground can show almost as many specimens of poor taste and mediocre manipulation as there are monuments within its gates;—a puzzle and a pain to those who have luxuriated in galleries and loggie, the very atmosphere of which ought to be, not only inspiration, but education.
Galileo’s Observatory, where he watched the stars pale before the dawn for many happy nights,—and the Villa, in which he lived for the last eleven years of his mortal life,—blind, illustrious, and, if we may believe him, contented;—whither Milton came to visit and console him and was moved to congratulation at the sight of his deep tranquillity,—stand upon a hill from whose brow Florence is, indeed, la Bella. Galileo’s lamp hangs in the Cathedral of Pisa.
Our excursion to this city was in mid-May. It is distant from Florence but four hours by rail. The intervening country is one of the loveliest tracts in Northern Italy. The wheat-fields were ripening into palest green, and every breath of wind that ruffled this revealed the scarlet sheen of the poppy underrobe. The railway banks were beds of mountain-pinks, separated by acres of buttercups and blue flax, clumps of wild roses and geraniums. Up to this we had felt no oppressive heats, fast though the season was advancing, and to-day, while the train was in motion, we rather enjoyed the blaze of sunshine under which the landscape glowed, while we gazed, into more vivid coloring. But the radiations from the white streets of Pisa were blinding. The breeze lost itself among the flat outskirts of the town, and was never suspected inland.
We took carriages at the hotel and drove, untempted to loiterings in the shadeless thoroughfares, directly to the Cathedral. It is fortunate for travelers who come to Pisa in spring or summer, that the four principal objects of interest, all that one cares to see in the whilom “queen of the western waves,” are grouped within a radius of fifty yards from the Duomo. Seeking its shadow from the pitiless sun, we looked up at the Leaning Tower “over the way.” It did not lean as emphatically as we had hoped for, nor was it as high as it should have been. But from the first glimpse of it, its lightness and grace were an agreeable surprise. And it was clean! Seven hundred years have not defiled it to the complexion of the Florentine Duomo, or even to the cloudiness of “that model and mirror of perfect architecture,” Giotto’s Tower. Its eight-storied colonnades of creamy tints passing into white, were cast up upon the deep blue background like the frost arcades raised at night by winter fairies. It was loftier, presently, and as it heightened, inclined more gracefully toward the earth.
“Like an ice-cream obelisk melting at the base,” suggested a heated spectator pensively.
We walked around the beautiful, majestic wonder; gazed up at its bent brow from the overhanging side; measured the dip of the foundation by the deepening of the area in which it is set, and laughed at ourselves for the natural recoil from walls that seemed to be toppling over upon us. While the young people, in the convoy of a guide, climbed the three hundred—save six—stairs winding up to the summit of the Campanile, Caput and I gladly took refuge in the cool dimness of the Cathedral. Seated upon a bench exactly over the spot where Galileo used to set his chair in order to gaze at the mighty chandelier pendent from the ceiling, we, too, watched it.
It is a grand sight—that great bronze lamp, its scores of disused candle-sockets hanging empty from the three broad bands. Five naked boys brace themselves upon their chubby feet against the lower band, and do Caryatide-duty for the upper. Scrolls, branches, and knops are exquisitely wrought, and the length of the chandelier must be at least twelve feet. The sacristan told us, in a subdued voice, how Galileo had the “habitude” of resorting to the church, day after day, and sitting “just here” to think and to pray. How his eyes, fixed mechanically upon the lamp, noted, one day, that the inclination of the long, slender rod to which it is attached was not quite the same at different hours; of his excitement as he divined the cause of the variation; that, after this, he haunted the Duomo continually until he thought out the truth—“or”—crossing himself, apologetically—“the Blessed Virgin revealed it to her faithful worshipper.”