Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 20, September, 1877.

by Various

Conspicuous among the brown-faced peasants were the students, who strolled by in groups with a lordly air of possession or gathered in knots at the street-corners and waxed loud in discussion. They were lithe, slender, handsome fellows, with dark eyes and fair skins and oval faces. They had that nameless poetic grace which is the birthright of all young Italians. The soft feminine beauty of these young Paduans, with their dainty dress and pretty girlish ways, was something akin to the sleepy grace of young lions. Watch that group at the corner waxing hot over some wrong done to the leaders of their party—some one of their political heroes arrested and cast into prison for uttering the thoughts of all just men. See their eyes flash, their hands move in anger and grope instinctively toward the place where they wore their swords in their year of service. Do you say that the old Paduan flame has died out of these young hearts? They are of the same temper as the hearts that held out against the Venetian, the Visconti, the pope himself—that made a hedge for the Austrian bayonets to pierce, and yielded life and fame and fortune for their country's sake, and languished in the hundred prisons of the northern tyrants, and were lifted up at last in one great glad shout of victory. Let those battle-fields among the olive-farms on the hills outside the gates tell the story of the Paduan students. Their bright youthfulness was like sunshine warming the gray old walls of the town. The romance of the old Italian life seemed incarnate in their graceful shapes. Such heads as theirs gleam out from the dark canvases that hang high in the corridors of the old palaces—sometimes as the portrait of a long-forgotten young knight; sometimes in the guise of a warrior-saint, some George or Michael, painted by a master hand; sometimes as a beautiful young ascetic in his monk's dress.

Is it strange that the pretty peasant-girls cast shy veiled glances at the young lads that stroll by with a careless stare? For centuries they have given pledges and broken them there under the dark arcade, and so they will do for centuries to come. There will be other holidays and other prayers at Antonio's shrine, and other girls will have ribbons bought for them at the booths, and then there will be a couple of kisses and a parting and a few tears, and now and then a broken heart. The young men will take their diplomas and go out into the world, and rush into the turmoil of the state and the senate and the court, and lose the proud heroic bearing of their youth in cringing and fawning; or they will settle down on their estates and marry the Marchesa Tal Quale, who will have many quarterings and many bank-notes, and their beautiful Greek outlines will disappear under the weight of fat proper to a landed proprietor. The grand ideals of their youth will drop away from them one by one, and they will laugh with contempt at their old student notions of liberty and freedom for high and low.

Only some morning, when the children tell them it is Sant' Antonio's Day, an old pain will rise in their hearts, and they will see the dear old arcades of Padua and the little gay booths, and trustful eyes and fresh girl-faces will start up in their memories; and when the church-bells ring out they will hide their heads from the marchesa and the marchesini and cry out aloud for the old happy student-time, when love and hope of glory and high belief in God and man were theirs. God pity them, those poor young things, in spite of all their glorious youth! The beautiful promise of their spring will ripen into dull mediocrity. They will learn to be false to themselves and the truth. Happier are they who die there in old Padua in the fulness of their youth and hope, and are borne to the great hall of the university and are laid on the black-draped bier, with candles burning about them and their fellow-students rising from their seats and bowing three times before the corpse, and reading the funeral eulogy of him who is going to his grave with the spirits of the great and good that have left their footprints in the solemn halls for his mourning train.

PIAZZA DELLA ERBE.

In the vestibule of the university, high up on the walls, hang the escutcheons of the more famous of the students of past centuries, gray with age and mould and cobweb. What colossal figures stalk about the quadrangle and along the overhanging galleries! The mightiest minds of Europe are among them. Every footfall makes an echo across the centuries. Yet of all the old shadows, the one that has the greatest charm for me is that of the gray-haired serving-man who steals along the gallery with the bundle under his arm. Do you say it is only the sunlight lying athwart the arches? I tell you it is Portia's faithful servant, and he has been to the university to seek Doctor Balthazar, her cousin, and has obtained from him a lawyer's cap and gown, and he is hastening home to Belmont, that his mistress may don them and reach Venice in time to save Antonio from the Jew's hands.

Sedate groups of students were seated on the terrace of the caffè opposite sipping beer in gentlemanly Italian fashion. Here and there some honest burgher family, out for a holiday, was cooling itself with pink ices after the pilgrimage to the shrine. The female members were clothed with garments of such exaggerated form and color that one sees at once why Petruchio, in spite of his madness, had wit enough left to send to Venice for the wedding-clothes, and why Katharine, after the atrocious fashions of Padua, was disposed to be content with anything the Veronese tailor chose to offer her.

We sauntered on to where the afternoon sun flashed red against the great arched windows of the Palace of Reason. It is a mighty stone edifice, with a curved glass roof over the great justice-hall, which was the pride of mediæval Padua. Under the pointed arches of the wide galleries outside are gathered gray old milestones and funeral tablets and antique busts that carry the stranger back to the days of Latin legend, when old Antenor came up from the south and founded the city.

On the piazza, under the shadow of the beautiful loggie, the market-women are gathering up the bright fruits from the stalls and folding their red umbrellas, and thanking the saint for a profitable feast-day. A flood of yellow sunlight streams over the piazza, wrapping it about with a delicious drowsiness. No sound is in the air save the echo of a footfall in some one of the dark streets behind or the yawn of a weary fruit-seller. In the little caffè under the arcades the idlers seem to have fallen into an enchanted sleep. Now and then a student saunters by, gazing dreamily up at the graceful galleries. Tired mothers hasten across the piazza, dragging their tired but happy children after them. The mothers are red in the face with the heat, their bonnets are nigh to falling off, and their mighty castles of hair are shaken to their foundations. The children's hands are filled with dead lilies and hard cakes, and their faces are aglow with melted sugar and happiness. They have a weary air, as through surfeit of sweets. They will welcome the work-day minestra to-night when they reach their homes high up among the terraces and the chimneys and the clothes-lines. Ah, well! Sant' Antonio's Day is drawing to a close.

Those children with the lilies in their hands carried me back to the old religious masque of centuries ago. The chroniclers tell us that every year, in the month of the Blessed Virgin, a procession formed here on the piazza in front of the palace composed of all the civil dignitaries, the priests, the nobles and the different guilds. At their head went two children beautiful as seraphim, the one dressed in snowy white, with golden hair falling on his shoulders and a sceptre of white lilies in his hand—the angel of the Annunciation; the other, clothed in a flowing blue garment, with long brown hair escaping from under her golden crown—the Blessed Virgin herself. So they passed on, accompanied by music and the shouts of the people, through the streets of Padua, that were hung with crimson arazzi and tapestry from the looms of Flanders and curtains of cloth of gold. Onward they went to the vineyard outside the town, in which stands Giotto's chapel. At the gate the procession paused, and there was a colloquy in rhyme between the Virgin and the angel, and all the dignitaries listened with profound seriousness, and a mass was chanted within the chapel, and bombs were exploded, and bells rung, and there were singing and shouting and feasting throughout Padua.