PROEM. MORE than three centuries and a half ago, in the mid spring-time of 1492, we are sure that the star-quenching angel of the dawn, as he traveled with broad slow wing from the Levant to the Pillars of Hercules, and from the summits of the Caucasus across all the snowy Alpine ridges to the dark nakedness of the western isles, saw nearly the same outline of firm land and unstable sea-saw the same great mountain shadows on the same valleys as he has seen to-day-saw olive mounts, and pine forests, and the broad plains, green with young corn or rain-freshened grass-saw the domes and spires of cities rising by the river sides or mingled with the sedge-like masts on the manycurved sea-coast, in the same spots where they rise to-day. And as the faint light of his course pierced into the dwellings of men, it fell, as now, on the rosy warmth of nestling children; on the haggard waking of sorrow and sickness; on the hasty uprising of the hard-handed laborer; and on the late sleep of the night-student, who had been questioning the stars or the sages, or his own soul, for that hidden knowledge which would break through the barrier of man's brief life, and show its dark path, that seemed to bend no whither, to be an arc in an immeasurable circle of light and glory. The great rivercourses which have shaped the lives of men have hardly changed; and those other streams, the life-currents that ebb and flow in human hearts, pulsate to the same great needs, the same great loves and terrors. As our thought follows close in the slow wake of the dawn, we are impressed A with the broad sameness of the human lot, which never alters in the main headings of its history hunger and labor, seed-time and harvest, love and death. Even if, instead of following the dim daybreak, our imagination pauses on a certain historical spot, and awaits the fuller morning, we may see a world-famous city, which has hardly changed its outline since the days of Columbus, seeming to stand as an almost unviolated symbol, amidst the flux of human things, to remind us that we still resemble the men of the past more than we differ from them, as the great mechanical principles on which those domes and towers were raised must make a likeness in human building that will be broader and deeper than all possible change. And doubtless, if the spirit of a Florentine citizen, whose eyes were closed for the last time while Columbus was still waiting and arguing for the three poor vessels with which he was to set sail from the port of Palos, could return from the shades, and pause where our thought is pausing, he would believe that there must still be fellowship and understanding for him among the inheritors of his birth-place. Let us suppose that such a Shade has been permitted to revisit the glimpses of the golden morning, and is standing once more on the famous hill of San Miniato, which overlooks Florence from the south. The Spirit is clothed in his habit as he lived; the folds of his well-lined black silk garment or lucco hang in grave unbroken lines from neck to ankle; his plain cloth cap, with its becchetto, or long hanging strip of drapery, to serve as a scarf in case of need, surmounts a penetrating should the towers have been leveled that were face, not, perhaps, very handsome, but with a firm, well-cut mouth, kept distinctly human by a close-shaven lip and chin. It is a face charged with memories of a keen and various life passed below there on the banks of the gleaming river; and as he looks at the scene before him, the sense of familiarity is so much stronger than the perception of change that he thinks it might be possible to descend once more among the streets and take up that busy life where he left it. For it is not only the mountains and the westwardbending river that he recognizes; not only the dark sides of Mount Morello opposite to him, and the long valley of the Arno that seems to stretch its gray, low-tufted luxuriance to the far-off ridges of Carrara; and the steep height of Fiesole, with its crown of monastic walls and cypresses; and all the green and gray slopes sprinkled with villas which he can name as he looks at them. He sees other familiar objects much closer to his daily walks. For though he misses the seventy or more towers that once surmounted the walls, and encircled the city as with a regal diadem, his eyes will not dwell on that blank; they are drawn irresistibly to the unique tower springing, like a tall flower-stem drawn toward the sun, from the square turreted mass of the Old Palace in the very heart of the city-the tower that looks none the worse for the four centuries that have passed since he used to I walk under it. The great dome, too, greatest in the world, which, in his early boyhood, had been only a daring thought in the mind of a small quick-eyed man—there it raises its large curves still, eclipsing the hills. And the wellknown bell-towers - Giotto's, with its distant hint of rich color, and the graceful spired Badia, and the rest-he looked at them all from the shoulder of his nurse. "Surely," he thinks, "Florence can still ring her bells with the solemn hammer-sound that used to beat on the hearts of her citizens and strike out the fire there. And here, on the right, stands the long dark mass of Santa Croce, where we buried our famous dead, laying the laurel on their cold brows and fanning them with the breath of praise and of banners. But Santa Croce had no spire then we Florentines were too full of great building projects to carry them all out in stone and marble; we had our frescoes and our shrines to pay for, not to speak of rapacious condottieri, bribed royalty, and purchased territories, and our façades and spires must needs wait. But what architect can the Frati Minori* have employed to build that spire for them? If it had been built in my day, Filippo Brunelleschi or Michelozzo would have devised something of another fashion than that-something worthy to crown the church of Arnolfo." At this the Spirit, with a sigh, lets his eyes travel on to the city walls, and now he dwells on the change there with wonder at these modern times. Why have five out of the eleven convenient gates been closed? And why, above all, *The Franciscans, once a glory and defense? Is the world become so peaceful, then, and do Florentines dwell in such harmony, that there are no longer conspiracies to bring ambitious exiles home again with armed bands at their back? These are difficult questions: it is easier and pleasanter to recognize the old than to account for the new. And there flows Arno, with its bridges just where they used to be-the Ponte Vecchio, least like other bridges in the world, laden with the same quaint shops, where our Spirit remembers lingering a little, on his way, perhaps, to look at the progress of that great palace which Messer Luca Pitti had set a-building with huge stones got from the Hill of Bogoli* close behind, or, perhaps, to transact a little business with the clothdressers in Oltrarno. The exorbitant line of the Pitti roof is hidden from San Miniato; but the yearning of the old Florentine is not to see Messer Luca's too ambitious palace which he built unto himself; it is to be down among those narrow streets and busy humming Piazze where he inherited the eager life of his fathers. Is not the anxious voting with black and white beans still going on down there? Who are the Priori in these months, eating soberly-regulated official dinners in the Palazzo Vecchio, with removes of tripe and boiled partridges, seasoned by practical jokes against the ill-fated butt among those potent signors? Are not the significant banners still hung from the windows-still distributed with decent pomp under Orcagna's Loggia every two months? Life had its zest for the old Florentine when he, too, trod the marble steps and shared in those dignities. His politics had an area as wide as his trade, which stretched from Syria to Britain, but they had also the passionate intensity, and the detailed practical interest, which could belong only to a narrow scene of corporate action; only to the members of a community shut in close by the hills and by walls of six miles' circuit, where men knew each other as they passed in the street, set their eyes every day on the memorials of their commonwealth, and were conscious of having not only the right to vote, but the chance of being voted for. He loved his honors and his gains, the business of his counting-house, of his guild, of the public councilchamber; he loved his enmities, too, and fingered the white bean which was to keep a hated name out of the borsa with more complacency than if it had been a golden florin. He loved to strengthen his family by a good alliance, and went home with a triumphant light in his eyes after concluding a satisfactory parentado, or marriage for his son or daughter, under his favorite loggia in the evening cool; he loved his game at chess under that same loggia, and his biting jest, and even his coarse joke, as not beneath the dignity of a man eligible for the highest magistracy. He had gained an insight into all sorts of affairs at home and abroad; he had been of the "Ten" who managed the war department, * Now Boboli. of the "Eight" who attended to home discipline, | web of belief and unbelief; of Epicurean levity of the Priori or Signori who were the heads of and fetichistic dread; of pedantic impossible the executive government; he had even risen to ethics uttered by rote, and crude passions acted the supreme office of Gonfaloniere; he had made out with childish impulsiveness; of inclination one in embassies to the Pope and to the Vene- toward a self-indulgent paganism, and inevitatians; and he had been commissary to the hired ble subjection to that human conscience which, army of the Republic, directing the inglorious in the unrest of a new growth, was filling the bloodless battles in which no man died of brave air with strange prophecies and presentiments. breast wounds-virtuosi colpi-but only of casual He had smiled, perhaps, and shaken his head falls and tramplings. And in this way he had dubiously, as he heard simple folk talk of a Pope learned to distrust men without bitterness; look- Angelico, who was to come by-and-by and bring ing on life mainly as a game of skill, but not in a new order of things, to purify the Church dead to traditions of heroism and clean-handed from simony, and the lives of the clergy from honor. For the human soul is hospitable, and scandal—a state of affairs too different from will entertain conflicting sentiments and contra- what existed under Innocent the Eighth for a dictory opinions with much impartiality. It was shrewd merchant and politician to regard the his pride, besides, that he was duly tinctured with prospect as worthy of entering into his calculathe learning of his age, and judged not altogether tions. But he felt the evils of the time, neverwith the vulgar, but in harmony with the an- theless; for he was a man of public spirit, and cients: he, too, in his prime, had been eager for public spirit can never be wholly immoral, since the most correct manuscripts, and had paid many its essence is care for a common good. That florins for antique vases and for disinterred busts very Quaresima, or Lent, of 1492, in which he of the ancient immortals-some, perhaps, truncis died, still in his erect old age, he had listened in naribus, wanting as to the nose, but not the less San Lorenzo, not without a mixture of satisfacauthentic; and in his old age he had made haste tion, to the preaching of a Dominican friar, who to look at the early sheets of that fine Homer denounced with a rare boldness the worldliness which was among the early glories of the Floren- and vicious habits of the clergy, and insisted on tine press. But he had not, for all that, neg- the duty of Christian men not to live for their lected to hang up a waxen image or double of own ease when wrong was triumphing in high himself under the protection of the Madonna places, and not to spend their wealth in outAnnunziata, or to do penance for his sins in ward pomp even in the churches, when their large gifts to the shrines of saints whose lives fellow-citizens were suffering from want and had not been modeled on the study of the clas- sickness. The Frate carried his doctrine rather sics; he had not even neglected making liberal too far for elderly ears; yet it was a memorable bequests toward buildings for the Frati, against thing to see a preacher move his audience to whom he had leveled many a jest. such a pitch that the women even took off their ornaments, and delivered them up to be sold for the benefit of the needy. For the Unseen Powers were mighty. Who knew-who was sure-that there was any name given to them behind which there was no angry "He was a noteworthy man, that Prior of force to be appeased, no intercessory pity to be San Marco," thinks our Spirit; "somewhat won? Were not gems medicinal, though they arrogant and extreme, perhaps, especially in his only pressed the finger? Were not all things denunciations of speedy vengeance. Ah, Iddio charged with occult virtues ? Lucretius might non paga il Sabato*-the wages of men's sins be right-he was an ancient and a great poet; often linger in their payment, and I myself saw Luigi Pulci, too, who was suspected of not be- much established wickedness of long-standing lieving any thing from the roof upward (dal prosperity. But a Frate Predicatore who wanttetto in su), had very much the air of being right ed to move the people-how could he be moderover the supper-table, when the wine and ribo- ate? He might have been a little less defiant boli were circulating fast, though he was only a and curt, though, to Lorenzo de' Medici, whose poet in the vulgar tongue. There were even family had been the very makers of San Marco: learned personages who maintained that Aris- was that quarrel ever made up? And our Lototle, wisest of men (unless, indeed, Plato were renzo himself, with the dim outward eyes and wiser?), was a thoroughly irreligious philoso- the subtle inward vision, did he get over that pher; and a liberal scholar must entertain all illness at Careggi? It was but a sad, uneasyspeculations. But the negatives might, after looking face that he would carry out of the all, prove false; nay, seemed manifestly false, world which had given him so much, and there as the circling hours swept past him, and turned were strong suspicions that his handsome son round with graver faces. For had not the world would play the part of Rehoboam. How has it become Christian? Had he not been baptized all turned out? Which party is likely to be in San Giovanni, where the dome is awful with banished and have its houses sacked just now? the symbols of coming judgment, and where the Is there any successor of the incomparable Loaltar bears a crucified Image disturbing to per- renzo, to whom the great Turk is so gracious as fect complacency in one's self and the world? to send over presents of rare animals, rare relics, Our resuscitated Spirit was not a pagan philoso- rare manuscripts, or fugitive enemies, suited to pher, nor a philosophizing pagan poet, but a man the tastes of a Christian Magnifico who is at of the fifteenth century, inheriting its strange *God does not pay on a Saturday." |