The Autumn in Florence

Florence too has its "season," not less than Rome, and I have
been rejoicing for the past six weeks in the fact that this
comparatively crowded parenthesis hasn't yet been opened. Coming
here in the first days of October I found the summer still in
almost unmenaced possession, and ever since, till within a day or
two, the weight of its hand has been sensible. Properly enough,
as the city of flowers, Florence mingles the elements most
artfully in the spring--during the divine crescendo of March and
April, the weeks when six months of steady shiver have still not
shaken New York and Boston free of the long Polar reach. But the
very quality of the decline of the year as we at present here
feel it suits peculiarly the mood in which an undiscourageable
gatherer of the sense of things, or taster at least of "charm,"
moves through these many-memoried streets and galleries and
churches. Old things, old places, old people, or at least old
races, ever strike us as giving out their secrets most freely in
such moist, grey, melancholy days as have formed the complexion
of the past fortnight. With Christmas arrives the opera, the only
opera worth speaking of--which indeed often means in Florence the
only opera worth talking through; the gaiety, the gossip, the
reminders in fine of the cosmopolite and watering-place character
to which the city of the Medici long ago began to bend her
antique temper. Meanwhile it is pleasant enough for the tasters
of charm, as I say, and for the makers of invidious distinctions,
that the Americans haven't all arrived, however many may be on
their way, and that the weather has a monotonous overcast
softness in which, apparently, aimless contemplation grows less
and less ashamed. There is no crush along the Cascine, as on the
sunny days of winter, and the Arno, wandering away toward the
mountains in the haze, seems as shy of being looked at as a good
picture in a bad light. No light, to my eyes, nevertheless, could
be better than this, which reaches us, all strained and filtered
and refined, exquisitely coloured and even a bit conspicuously
sophisticated, through the heavy air of the past that hangs about
the place for ever.

I first knew Florence early enough, I am happy to say, to have
heard the change for the worse, the taint of the modern order,
bitterly lamented by old haunters, admirers, lovers--those
qualified to present a picture of the conditions prevailing under
the good old Grand-Dukes, the two last of their line in especial,
that, for its blest reflection of sweetness and mildness and
cheapness and ease, of every immediate boon in life to be
enjoyed quite for nothing, could but draw tears from belated
listeners. Some of these survivors from