If the half-hour between Leghorn and Pisa had been spent in any less
lovely transit, I should still be grieving for the loss of the thirty
minutes which might so much better have been given to either place.
But
with the constant line of mountains enclosing the landscape on the
right, in all its variety of tillage, pasture-land, vineyard, and
orchard, and the unchanging level which had once been the bed of the
sea, we were gainers in sort beyond the gift of those cities. We had the
company, great part of the way, of more stone-pines than we had seen
even between Naples and Rome, here gathering into thick woods, with the
light beautiful beneath the spread of their horizontal boughs, there
grouped in classic groves, and yonder straying off in twos and threes.
We had the canal that of old time made Pisa a port of the Mediterranean,
with Leghorn for her servant on the shore (or, if it was not this canal,
it was another as straight and long), with a peasant walking beside it,
under a light-green umbrella, in the showers which threatened our start
but spared our arrival. We had then the city, with its domes and towers,
grown full height out of the plain through which the Arno curves in the
stateliest crescent of all its course.
The day had turned finer than any other day I can now think of in my
whole life, and I was once more in Pisa without the care for its history
or art or even novelty which had corroded my mind in former visits.
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