"Could we but know when we are happy!" sighs some poet. As well might he write, "Could we but set the dewdrop with our diamonds! could we but stay the rainbow in our skies!"
Every old Italian city has this awe about it—holds close the past and moves the living to a curious sense that they are dead and in their graves are dreaming; for the old cities themselves have beheld so much perish around them, and yet have kept so firm a hold upon tradition and upon the supreme beauty of great arts, that those who wander there grow, as it were, bewildered, and know not which is life and which is death amongst them.
The sun was setting.
Over the whole Valdarno there was everywhere a faint ethereal golden mist that rose from the water and the woods.
The town floated on it as upon a lake; her spires, and domes, and towers, and palaces bathed at their base in its amber waves, and rising upward into the rose-hued radiance of the upper air. The mountains that encircled her took all the varying hues of the sunset on their pale heights until they flushed to scarlet, glowered to violet, wavered with flame, and paled to whiteness, as the opal burns and fades. Warmth, fragrance, silence, loveliness encompassed her; and in the great stillness the bell of the basilica tolled slowly the evening call to prayer.
Thus Florence rose before me.
A strange tremor of exceeding joy thrilled through me as I beheld the reddened shadows of those close-lying roofs, and those marble heights of towers and of temples. At last my eyes gazed on her! the daughter of flowers, the mistress of art, the nursing mother of liberty and of aspiration.
I fell on my knees and thanked God. I pity those who, in such a moment, have not done likewise.