Tuscan Cities - Page 2

shrubbery the red house-
tiles against the deep blue sky and the grey underside of the
ilex-leaves turned up by the Mediterranean breeze, it was all
still quite Tuscany, if Tuscany in the minor key.

If you should naturally desire, in such conditions, a higher
intensity, you have but to proceed, by a very short journey, to
Pisa--where, for that matter, you will seem to yourself to have
hung about a good deal already, and from an early age. Few of us
can have had a childhood so unblessed by contact with the arts as
that one of its occasional diversions shan't have been a puzzled
scrutiny of some alabaster model of the Leaning Tower under a
glass cover in a back-parlour. Pisa and its monuments have, in
other words, been industriously vulgarised, but it is astonishing
how well they have survived the process. The charm of the place
is in fact of a high order and but partially foreshadowed by the
famous crookedness of its campanile. I felt it irresistibly and
yet almost inexpressibly the other afternoon, as I made my way to
the classic corner of the city through the warm drowsy air which
nervous people come to inhale as a sedative. I was with an
invalid companion who had had no sleep to speak of for a
fortnight. "Ah! stop the carriage," she sighed, or yawned, as I
could feel, deliciously, "in the shadow of this old slumbering
palazzo, and let me sit here and close my eyes, and taste for an
hour of oblivion." Once strolling over the grass, however, out of
which the quartette of marble monuments rises, we awaked
responsively enough to the present hour. Most people remember the
happy remark of tasteful, old-fashioned Forsyth (who touched a
hundred other points in his "Italy" scarce less happily) as to
the fact that the four famous objects are "fortunate alike in
their society and their solitude." It must be admitted that they
are more fortunate in their society than we felt ourselves to be
in ours; for the scene presented the animated appearance for
which, on any fine spring day, all the choicest haunts of ancient
quietude in Italy are becoming yearly more remarkable. There were
clamorous beggars at all the sculptured portals, and bait for
beggars, in abundance, trailing in and out of them under convoy
of loquacious ciceroni. I forget just how I apportioned the
responsibility, of intrusion, for it was not long before fellow-
tourists and fellow-countrymen became a vague, deadened, muffled
presence, that of the dentist's last words when he is giving you
ether. They suffered mystic disintegration in the dense, bright,
tranquil air, so charged with its own messages. The Cathedral and
its companions are fortunate indeed in everything--fortunate in
the spacious angle