And I walked to all the old places, to Fiesole and back, the walk of many hours, but enchanting all the way; now past the villa of Walter Savage Landor, now the Villa Palmieri, the scene of the Decameron.
Then the walk over the Viale, then the walk along the sweet, soft Certosa Road, the monastery now inhabited by a single monk, the caretaker of the past. These walks and many others made Florence an ideal native land.
Then I settled down to my table to take stock of my work. I had, while at Bath, received many reviews of my last volume, always favourable; and I now contemplated a further adventure.
During a visit to Kelmscott, I wrote “Reminiscence,” a poem describing the manor-house, the river, and surrounding scenery.
I took this to Florence with me, together with “Ecce Homo,” “The Exile,” and “Ortrud’s Vision;” there I added others, “The Painter,” “Michael Angelo,” and one or two besides, to my little store; and some I wrote on my return to London, the next year, making in all a dozen poems, which came out, not before 1876, as “New Symbols.”
My correspondence with Rossetti from Florence was constant; it was after his reading “The Painter” that he offered a suggestion to me to write “The Sculptor,” which I did, giving it the name of his idol, “Michael Angelo.”
This poem I sent to Rossetti in manuscript, and he was pleased to return me the following gracious reply, which I extract from a long letter.
“I read ‘The Sculptor,’ which may perhaps rank as the most masterly of your poems; some passages (as stanza three) having absolutely a new and valuable image in every couplet, and being as perfect in expression as words can make them. I found the poem still further a gainer on being submitted to the ordeal of vivâ voce reading, on the occasion of Brown’s being here lately, when the whole was encored and several stanzas more than encored.”
I sketched out the “Birth of Venus” while in Italy; this time I had seen that imaginary drama acted, in the waters of Nervi. In reply to a copy I sent Rossetti of it, he remarked on two lines in the thirty-eighth stanza, where the goddess sees herself reflected in the water. “It is an idea so beautiful,” he said, “as to seldom occur to any poet during a lifetime.” The lines are—
“Under her rose-dipped feet, the mirror shows