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. I had been there twice before - once in 1864, when I had done its wonders with all the wonder they merited, and again in 1883, when I had lived its memories on the scene of its manifold and mighty experiences. No distinct light from that learning vexed my present vision, but an agreeable mist of association, nothing certain, nothing tangible remaining, but only a gentle vague involving everything, in which I could possess my soul in peace. In this glimmer I recognized a certain cabman as having been waiting there from the dawn of time, with his dark-eyed little son, to make me his willing captive at something above the tariff rates, but destined by the same fate to serve me well, and to part with me friends at the close of the day for a franc more than the excess agreed upon. It costs so small a sum to corrupt the common carrier in Italy that I hold it wrong to fail of any chance, and this driver had not only a horse of uncommon qualities, but he spoke a beautiful Tuscan, and he had his Pisa at his fingers' ends.

We were of one mind about driving without delay to the famous group which is without rival on the earth, though there may be associated edifices in the red planet Mars that surpass the Cathedral, the Leaning Tower, the Baptistery, and the Campo Santo at Pisa. What genius it was imagined placing them in the pleasant meadow where they sit, just beyond the city streets, I do not know, but it was inspiration beyond any effect of mere taste, and it commanded my worship as much the last as the first time. The meadow still swims round them and breaks in a foam of daisies at their feet; for I take it that it is always mid-April there, and that the grass is as green and the sun as yellow on it as the afternoon we saw it. The sacred edifices are as golden as the light on them, and there is such a joyous lift in the air that it is a wonder they do not swing loose from their foundations and soar away into the celestial blue. For travellers in our willing mood there was, of course, the predestined cicerone waiting for us at the door of the cathedral, who would fix no price for the pleasure he was born to do us, yet still consented to take more than twice that he ought to have had at parting. But he was worth the money; he was worth quite two francs, and, though he was not without the fault of his calling and would have cumbered us with instruction, I will not blame him, for after a moment I perceived that his intelligence was such that I might safely put my hands in my pocket on my shut guide-book and follow him from point to point without fear of missing anything worth noting. Among the things worthiest noting, I saw, as if I had never seen them before, the unforgettable, forgotten Andrea del Sartos, especially the St. Agnes, in whose face you recognize the well-known features of the painter's wife, but with a gentler look than they usually wore in his Madonnas, perhaps because he happened to study these from that difficult lady when she was in her least celestial moods. Besides the masterpieces of other masters, there is a most noble So-doma, which the great Napoleon carried away to Paris and which the greater French people afterward restored. At every step in the beautiful temple you may well pause, for it abounds in pictures and sculptures, the least of which would enrich St. Peter's at Rome beyond the proudest effect of its poverty-stricken grandeur. Ghirlandajo, Michelangelo, Gaddo Gaddi, John of Bologna - the names came back to me out of a past of my own almost as remote as theirs, while our guide repeated them, in their relation to the sculptures or pictures or architecture, with those of lesser lights of art, and that school of Giotto, of all whose frescos once covering its walls the fire of three hundred years ago has left a few figures clinging to one of the pillars, faint and uncertain as the memories of my own former visits to the church. I did, indeed, remember me of an old bronze lamp, by Vincenzo Possenti, hanging from the roof, which I now revered the third time, at intervals of twenty years; from its oscillation Galileo is said to have got the notion of the pendulum; but it is now tied back with a wire, being no longer needed for such an inspiration.

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