Siena Early and Late

I

Florence being oppressively hot and delivered over to the
mosquitoes, the occasion seemed to favour that visit to Siena
which I had more than once planned and missed. I arrived late in
the evening, by the light of a magnificent moon, and while a
couple of benignantly-mumbling old crones were making up my bed
at the inn strolled forth in quest of a first impression. Five
minutes brought me to where I might gather it unhindered as it
bloomed in the white moonshine. The great Piazza of Siena is
famous, and though in this day of multiplied photographs and
blunted surprises and profaned revelations none of the world's
wonders can pretend, like Wordsworth's phantom of delight, really
to "startle and waylay," yet as I stepped upon the waiting scene
from under a dark archway I was conscious of no loss of the edge
of a precious presented sensibility. The waiting scene, as I have
called it, was in the shape of a shallow horse-shoe--as the
untravelled reader who has turned over his travelled friends'
portfolios will respectfully remember; or, better, of a bow in
which the high wide face of the Palazzo Pubblico forms the cord
and everything else the arc. It was void of any human presence
that could figure to me the current year; so that, the moonshine
assisting, I had half-an-hour's infinite vision of mediæval
Italy. The Piazza being built on the side of a hill--or rather,
as I believe science affirms, in the cup of a volcanic crater--
the vast pavement converges downwards in slanting radiations of
stone, the spokes of a great wheel, to a point directly before
the Palazzo, which may mark the hub, though it is nothing more
ornamental than the mouth of a drain. The great monument stands
on the lower side and might seem, in spite of its goodly mass and
its embattled cornice, to be rather defiantly out-countenanced by
vast private constructions occupying the opposite eminence. This
might be, without the extraordinary dignity of the architectural
gesture with which the huge high-shouldered pile asserts itself.

On the firm edge of the palace, from bracketed base to grey-
capped summit against the sky, where grows a tall slim tower
which soars and soars till it has given notice of the city's
greatness over the blue mountains that mark the horizon. It rises
as slender and straight as a pennoned lance planted on the steel-
shod toe of a mounted knight, and keeps all to itself in the blue
air, far above the changing fashions of the market, the proud
consciousness or rare arrogance once built into it. This
beautiful tower, the finest thing in Siena and, in its rigid
fashion, as permanently fine thus as a really handsome nose on a
face of no matter what accumulated age, figures there