Other Tuscan Cities

I

I had scanted charming Pisa even as I had scanted great Siena in
my original small report of it, my scarce more than stammering
notes of years before; but even if there had been meagreness of
mere gaping vision--which there in fact hadn't been--as well as
insufficieny of public tribute, the indignity would soon have
ceased to weigh on my conscience. For to this affection I was to
return again still oftener than to the strong call of Siena my
eventual frequentations of Pisa, all merely impressionistic and
amateurish as they might be--and I pretended, up and down the
length of the land, to none other--leave me at the hither end of
time with little more than a confused consciousness of exquisite
quality on the part of the small sweet scrap of a place of
ancient glory; a consciousness so pleadingly content to be
general and vague that I shrink from pulling it to pieces. The
Republic of Pisa fought with the Republic of Florence, through
the ages so ferociously and all but invincibly that what is so
pale and languid in her to-day may well be the aspect of any
civil or, still more, military creature bled and bled and bled at
the "critical" time of its life. She has verily a just languor
and is touchingly anæmic; the past history, or at any rate the
present perfect acceptedness, of which condition hangs about her
with the last grace of weakness, making her state in this
particular the very secret of her irresistible appeal. I was to
find the appeal, again and again, one of the sweetest, tenderest,
even if not one of the fullest and richest impressions possible;
and if I went back whenever I could it was very much as one
doesn't indecently neglect a gentle invalid friend. The couch of
the invalid friend, beautifully, appealingly resigned, has been
wheeled, say, for the case, into the warm still garden, and your
visit but consists of your sitting beside it with kind, discreet,
testifying silences. Such is the figurative form under which the
once rugged enemy of Florence, stretched at her length by the
rarely troubled Arno, to-day presents herself; and I find my
analogy complete even to my sense of the mere mild séance,
the inevitably tacit communion or rather blank interchange,
between motionless cripple and hardly more incurable admirer.

The terms of my enjoyment of Pisa scarce departed from that
ideal--slow contemplative perambulations, rather late in the day
and after work done mostly in the particular decent inn-room that
was repeatedly my portion; where the sunny flicker of the river
played up from below to the very ceiling, which, by the same
sign, anciently and curiously raftered and hanging over my table
at a great height, had been colour-pencilled into