Siena Early and Late - Page 2

still as a
Declaration of Independence beside which such an affair as ours,
thrown off at Philadelphia, appears to have scarce done more than
helplessly give way to time. Our Independence has become a
dependence on a thousand such dreadful things as the incorrupt
declaration of Siena strikes us as looking for ever straight over
the level of. As it stood silvered by the moonlight, while my
greeting lasted, it seemed to speak, all as from soul to soul,
very much indeed as some ancient worthy of a lower order,
buttonholing one on the coveted chance and at the quiet hour,
might have done, of a state of things long and vulgarly
superseded, but to the pride and power, the once prodigious
vitality, of which who could expect any one effect to testify
more incomparably, more indestructibly, quite, as it were, more
immortally? The gigantic houses enclosing the rest of the Piazza
took up the tale and mingled with it their burden. "We are very
old and a trifle weary, but we were built strong and piled high,
and we shall last for many an age. The present is cold and
heedless, but we keep ourselves in heart by brooding over our
store of memories and traditions. We are haunted houses in every
creaking timber and aching stone." Such were the gossiping
connections I established with Siena before I went to bed.

Since that night I have had a week's daylight knowledge of the
surface of the subject at least, and don't know how I can better
present it than simply as another and a vivider page of the
lesson that the ever-hungry artist has only to trust old
Italy for her to feed him at every single step from her hand--and
if not with one sort of sweetly-stale grain from that wondrous
mill of history which during so many ages ground finer than any
other on earth, why then always with something else. Siena has at
any rate "preserved appearances"--kept the greatest number of
them, that is, unaltered for the eye--about as consistently as
one can imagine the thing done. Other places perhaps may treat
you to as drowsy an odour of antiquity, but few exhale it from so
large an area. Lying massed within her walls on a dozen clustered
hill-tops, she shows you at every turn in how much greater a way
she once lived; and if so much of the grand manner is extinct,
the receptacle of the ashes still solidly rounds itself. This
heavy general stress of all her emphasis on the past is what she
constantly keeps in your eyes and your ears, and if you be but a
casual observer and admirer the generalised response is mainly
what you give her. The casual observer, however beguiled, is
mostly not very learned, not over-equipped in advance with data;
he hasn't specialised, his notions are necessarily vague, the