Was The Way To Mantua As Beautiful, In His Time, I Wonder!
Did it
wind through pasture land as green, bright with the same glancing
streams, and dotted with fresh clumps of graceful trees!
Those
purple mountains lay on the horizon, then, for certain; and the
dresses of these peasant girls, who wear a great, knobbed, silver
pin like an English 'life-preserver' through their hair behind, can
hardly be much changed. The hopeful feeling of so bright a
morning, and so exquisite a sunrise, can have been no stranger,
even to an exiled lover's breast; and Mantua itself must have
broken on him in the prospect, with its towers, and walls, and
water, pretty much as on a commonplace and matrimonial omnibus. He
made the same sharp twists and turns, perhaps, over two rumbling
drawbridges; passed through the like long, covered, wooden bridge;
and leaving the marshy water behind, approached the rusty gate of
stagnant Mantua.
If ever a man were suited to his place of residence, and his place
of residence to him, the lean Apothecary and Mantua came together
in a perfect fitness of things. It may have been more stirring
then, perhaps. If so, the Apothecary was a man in advance of his
time, and knew what Mantua would be, in eighteen hundred and forty-
four. He fasted much, and that assisted him in his foreknowledge.
I put up at the Hotel of the Golden Lion, and was in my own room
arranging plans with the brave Courier, when there came a modest
little tap at the door, which opened on an outer gallery
surrounding a court-yard; and an intensely shabby little man looked
in, to inquire if the gentleman would have a Cicerone to show the
town.
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