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and sa rificed by her father to his avarice or his ambition, was, in the fourth year of an unhappy marriage, consigned to the grave.

With the usual solemnities she was conveyed to the cemetery of the cathedral, and deposited in a sepulchre of the family that was long pointed out; but she was not to remain there. For she had been buried in a trance; and, awaking at midnight "among them that slept," she disengaged in the darkness her hands and her feet, and, climbing up the narrow staircase to a gate that had been left unlocked, came abroad into the moonshine, wondering where she was, and what had befallen her. When she had in some degree recovered herself, she sought the house of her husband;* going forth in her grave-clothes and passing through the street, that was thenceforth to be called the Street of the Dead.f But, when she arrived there and he beheld her, he started back as from a spectre, and shut the door against her and fled.

To her father then she directed her steps, and afterwards to an uncle, but with no better success; and now, being everywhere rejected, and with horror, what, alas, had she to do but to die! to return to the place from which in that garment she had wan dered? For a while, in her agony, she is said to have sheltered herself under the porch of St. Bartholomew; till, the day beginning to break and the stir of life to gather round her, she resolved at once to fly for refuge to him who had loved her from their childhood, and who could never reject her.

Undistinguished in the crowd, he had followed the funeral-train; and, having taken a last look before she was removed from the bier, he was brooding at home on the past, when a voice came through the lattice, like a voice from heaven, and the interview let those imagine who can.

The sequel will surprise the reader, but we should remember when and where they lived. Her husband claiming her, she appealed to the ecclesiastical court; and, after due deliberation, it was decided that, having been buried with the rites of the church, and having passed through the grave, she was absolved from her vow, and at liberty to marry again. Firenza Illustrate. L'Osservatore Fiorentino.

(140) Inferno, 33. A more dreadful vehicle for satire cannot well be conceived. Dante, according to Boccaccio, was passing by a door in Verona, at which some women were sitting, when one of them was overheard to say, in a low voice, to the rest, Do you see that man? He it is who visits hell whenever he pleases; and who returns to give an account of those he finds there. I can believe it, replied another. Don't you observe his brown skin and his frizzled beard?

(141) "Movemur enim nescio quo pacto locis ipsis, in quibus eorum, quos diligimus, aut admiramur, adsunt vestigia. Me quidem ipsæ illæ nostræ Athenæ non tam operibus magnificis exquisitisque antiquorum artibus delectant, quàm recordatione summorum virorum, ubi quisque habitare, ubi sedere, ubi disputare sit solitus: studiosèque eorum etiam sepulchra contemplor.". Cic. de Legibus, ii. 2.

(142) A saying of Michael Angelo. They are the work of Lorenzo Ghiberti.

(143) "Mio bel san Giovanni." - Inferno, 19.

(144) Great, indeed, are the miseries that here await the children of genius; so exquisitely alive are they to every breath that stirs. But, if they suffer more than others, more than others is it theirs to enjoy. Every gleam of sunshine on their journey has a lustre not its own; and, to the last, come what may,- how great is their delight when they pour forth their conceptions, when they deliver what they receive from the God that

Nel corso degh Adimari.

+ La Via dell Morte, 'o, per dir meglio, della Morta.

is within them; how great the confidence with which they look forward to the day, however distant, when those who are yet unborn shall bless them!

(145) Paradiso, 17.

(146) The Chapel de' Depositi; in which are the tombs of the Medici, by Michael Angelo.

(147) He died early; living only to become the father of Catherine de Medicis. Had an evil spirit assumed the human shape to propagate mischief, he could not have done

better.

The statue is larger than the life, but not so large as to shock belief. It is the most real and unreal thing that ever came from the chisel.

(148) The Day of All Souls; Il dì de Morti.

(149) Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor!"

Perhaps there is nothing in language more affecting than his last testament. It is addressed To God, the Deliverer," and was found steeped in his blood.

(150) Filippo Strozzi.

(151) The Tribune.

(152) Cosmo, the first Grand Duke.

(153) De Thou.

(154) Elenora di Toledo. Of the children that survived her, one fell by a brother, one by a husband, and a third murdered his wife. But that family was soon to become extinct. It is some consolation to reflect that their country did not go unrevenged for the calamities which they had brought upon her. How many of them died by the hands of each other! - See p. 448.

(155) De Thou.

(156) The Palazzo Vecchio. Cosmo had left it several years before.

(157) By Vasari, who attended him on this occasion. Thuanus, de Vitâ suâ, i.

(158) It was given out that they had died of a contagious fever: and funeral orations were publicly pronounced in their honor.

Alfieri has written a tragedy on the subject; if it may be said so, when he has altered so entirely the story and the characters.

(159) He was the father of modern painting, and the master of Giotto, whose talent he discovered in the way here alluded to.

"Cimabue stood still, and, having considered the boy and his work, he asked him if he would go and live with him at Florence. To which the boy answered that, if his father was willing, he would go, with all his heart."- Vasari.

Of Cimabue little now remains at Florence, except his celebrated Madonna, larger than the life, in Santa Maria Novella. It was painted, according to Vasari, in a garden near Porta S. Piero, and, when finished, was carried to the church in solemn procession, with trumpets before it. The garden lay without the walls; and such was the rejoicing there on the occasion, such the feasting, that the suburb received the name of Borgo Allegri, a name it still bears, though now a part of the city.

(160) His first instrument was presented by him to the Doge of Venice; and there is a tradition at Venice that he exhibited its wonders on the top of the tower of St. Mark.

His second, which discovered the satellites of Jupiter, and was endeared to him, as he says, by much fatigue and by many a midnight watch, remained entire, I believe, till very lately, in the Museum at Florence.

Kepler's letter to him on that discovery is very characteristic of the writer. "I was sitting idle at home, thinking of you and your letters, most excellent Galileo, when Wachenfels stopped his carriage at my door to tell me the news; and such was my wonder when I heard it, such my agitation (for at once it decided an old controversy of ours), that, what with his joy and my surprise, and the laughter of both, we were for some time unable, he to speak, and I to listen. At last I began to consider how they could be there, without overturning my Mysterium Cosmographicum, published thirteen years ago. Not that I doubt their existence. So far from it, I am longing for a glass, that I may, if possible, get the start of you, and find two for Mars, six or eight for Saturn," &c. In Jupiter and his satellites, seen as they now are, "we behold, at a single glance of the eye, a beautiful miniature of the planetary system," and perhaps of every system of worlds through the regions of space.

(161) It is somewhere mentioned that Michael Angelo, when he set out from Florence to build the dome of St. Peter's, turned his horse round in the road to contemplate once more that of the cathedral, as it rose in the gray of the morning from among the pines and cypresses of the city, and that he said, after a pause, "Come te non voglio! Meglio di te non posso!" * He never, indeed, spoke of it but with admiration; and, if we may believe tradition, his tomb by his own desire was to be so placed in the Santa Croce as that from it might be seen, when the doors of the church stood open, that noble work of Bru nelleschi.

(162) Santa Maria Novella. For its grace and beauty it was called by Michael Angelo "La Sposa."

(163) In the year of the Great Plague. See the Decameron.

(164) Once, on a bright November morning, I set out and traced them, as I conceived, step by step; beginning and ending in the Church of Santa Maria Novella. It was a walk delightful in itself and in its associations.

(165) I have here followed Baldelli. It has been said that Boccaccio drew from his imagination. But is it likely, when he and his readers were living within a mile or two of the spot? Truth or fiction, it furnishes a pleasant picture of the manners and amusements of the Florentines in that day.

(166) At three o'clock. Three hours after sunrise, according to the old manner of reckoning.

(167) Boccaccio.

(168) Decameron, vi. 10.

(169) Macchiavel.

(170) See a very interesting letter from Macchiavel to Francesco Vettori, dated the 10th of December, 1513.

(171) Since the invention of letters, when we began to write, how much, that will live forever, has come in solitude and in silence from the head and the heart! No voice delivers it when it comes; yet on by its own energy it goes through the world, come

Like thee I will not build one. Better than thee I cannot.

whence it may, - from the distant, from the dead, — and on it will continue to go, enlight ening millions yet unborn in regions yet undiscovered.

(172) La Verdea. It is celebrated by Rinuccini, Redi, and most of the Tuscan poets nor is it unnoticed by some of ours.

"Say, he had been at Rome and seen the relics,

Drunk your Verdea wine," &c.

Beaumont and Fletcher.

(173) It is difficult to conceive what Galileo must have felt, when, having constructed his telescope, he turned it to the heavens, and saw the mountains and valleys in the moon. Then the moon was another earth; the earth another planet; and all were subject to the same laws. What an evidence of the simplicity and the magnificence of nature!

But at length he turned it again, still directing it upward, and again he was lost; for he was now among the fixed stars; and, if not magnified as he expected them to be, they were multiplied beyond measure.

What a moment of exultation for such a mind as his! But as yet it was only the dawn of a day that was coming; nor was he destined to live till that day was in its splendor. The great law of gravitation was not yet to be made known; and how little did he think, as he held the instrument in his hand, that we should travel by it so far as we have done; that its revelations would ere long be so glorious !

Among the innumerable stars now discovered, and at every improvement of the telescope we discover more and more, there are many at such a distance from this little planet of ours, that "their light must have taken at least a thousand years to reach us." The intelligence which they may be said to convey to us, night after night, must therefore, when we receive it, be a thousand years old; for every ray that comes must have set out as long ago; and, "when we observe their places and note their changes," they may have ceased to exist for a thousand years.

Nor can their dimensions be less wonderful than their distances; if Sirius, as it is more than conjectured, be nearly equal to fourteen suns, and there are others that surpass Sirius. Yet all of them must be as nothing in the immensity of space, and amidst the "numbers without number" that may never become visible here, though they were created in the beginning. -Sir John Herschel.

(174) Galileo came to Arcetri at the close of the year 1633; and remained there, while he lived, by an order of the Inquisition.* It is without the walls, near the Porta Romana.

He was buried with all honor in the church of the Santa Croce.

(175) Il Giojello.

(176) Ariosto himself employed much of his time in gardening; and to his garden at Ferrara we owe many a verse.

(177) Milton went to Italy in 1638. "There it was," says he, "that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition." "Old and blind," he might have said. Galileo, by his own account, became blind in December, 1637. Milton, as we learn from the date of Sir Henry Wotton's letter to him, had not left England on the 18th of April following. See Tiraboschi, and Wotton's Remains.

(178) It has pleased God, said he, that I should be blind; and must not I also be pleased?

For believing in the motion of the earth. "They may issue their decrees," says Pascal, “it is te If the earth is really turning round, all mankind together cannot keep it from turning or keep themselves from turning with it."-Les Provinciales, xviii.

no purpose.

(179) If we may judge from the progress which our language has made and is making, where, in what region, however distant, may it not prevail? And how inspiring, yet how Awful is the reflection! for who among us can say where what he writes will not be read, where the seed which he sows will not spring up to good or to evil?

"I care not," says Milton, "to be once named abroad, though perhaps I could attain to that; being content with these islands as my world." Yet where may he not be named, and with reverence? Where may not the verse which he delivered in trust to others, as he sate dictating in his darkness, be treasured up in the memories and in the hearts of men; his language being theirs?

(180) If such was their lot in life, if it was theirs to live under discountenance and in blindness, they were not without their reward; living, as so many have done, in the full assurance that their labor would not be lost, and that sooner or later the world would be the happier and the better for their having lived in it.

(181) They rise within thirteen miles of each other.

(182) Il Sagro Eremo.

(183) I cannot dismiss Pisa without a line or two; for much do I owe to her. If Time has levelled her ten thousand towers (for, like Lucca, she was "torreggiata a guisa d'un boschetto"), she has still her cathedral and her baptistery, her belfry and her cemetery; and from Time they have acquired more than they have lost.

If many a noble monument is gone,

That said how glorious in her day she was,
There is a sacred place within her walls,
Sacred and silent, save when they that die
Come there to rest, and they that live to pray,
For then are voices heard, crying to God,
Where yet remain, apart from all things else,
Four such as nowhere on the earth are seen
Assembled ; and at even, when the sun
Sinks in the west, and in the east the moon
As slowly rises, her great round displaying

Over a city now so desolate

Such is the grandeur, such the solitude,

Such their dominion in that solemn hour,

We stand and gaze and wonder where we are,

In this world or another.

(184) It was in this manner that the first Sforza went down when he perished in the Pescara.

(185) Michael Angelo.

(186) A description of the Cartoon of Pisa.

(187) Petrarch, as we learn from himself, was on his way to Ancisa; whither his mother was retiring. He was seven months old at the time.

(188) "O ego quantus eram, gelidi cum stratus ad Arni
Murmura," &c.

Epitaphium Damonis.

(189) There were the "Nobili di Torre " and the "Nobili di Loggia."

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