Other Tuscan Cities - Page 2

ornament as
fine (for all practical purposes) as the page of a missal. I add
to this, for remembrance, an inveteracy of evening idleness and
of reiterated ices in front of one of the quiet cafés--quiet as
everything at Pisa is quiet, or will certainly but in these
latest days have ceased to be; one in especial so beautifully, so
mysteriously void of bustle that almost always the neighbouring
presence and admirable chatter of some group of the local
University students would fall upon my ear, by the half-hour at
a time, not less as a privilege, frankly, than as a clear-cut
image of the young Italian mind and life, by which I lost
nothing. I use such terms as "admirable" and "privilege," in this
last most casual of connections--which was moreover no connection
at all but what my attention made it--simply as an acknowledgment
of the interest that might play there through some inevitable
thoughts. These were, for that matter, intensely in keeping with
the ancient scene and air: they dealt with the exquisite
difference between that tone and type of ingenuous adolescence--
in the mere relation of charmed audition--and other forms
of juvenility of whose mental and material accent one had
elsewhere met the assault. Civilised, charmingly civilised, were
my loquacious neighbours--as how had n't they to be, one asked
one's self, through the use of a medium of speech that is in
itself a sovereign saturation? There was the beautiful
congruity of the happily-caught impression; the fact of my young
men's general Tuscanism of tongue, which related them so on the
spot to the whole historic consensus of things. It wasn't
dialect--as it of course easily might have been elsewhere, at
Milan, at Turin, at Bologna, at Naples; it was the clear Italian
in which all the rest of the surrounding story was told, all the
rest of the result of time recorded; and it made them delightful,
prattling, unconscious men of the particular little constituted
and bequeathed world which everything else that was charged with
old meanings and old beauty referred to--all the more that their
talk was never by any chance of romping games or deeds of
violence, but kept flowering, charmingly and incredibly, into
eager ideas and literary opinions and philosophic discussions
and, upon my honour, vital questions.

They have taken me too far, for so light a reminiscence; but I
claim for the loose web of my impressions at no point a heavier
texture. Which comes back to what I was a moment ago saying--
that just in proportion as you "feel" the morbid charm of Pisa
you press on it gently, and this somehow even under stress of
whatever respectful attention. I found this last impulse, at all
events, so far as