testimony of home,
testimony that dropped for us from the ample canvas of Mr. Cole, "the
American Turner" which covered half a side of our front parlour, and in
which, though not an object represented in it began to stand out after
the manner of Mr. Leutze, I could always lose myself as soon as look. It
depicted Florence from one of the neighbouring hills--I have often since
wondered which, the picture being long ago lost to our sight; Florence
with her domes and towers and old walls, the old walls Mr. Cole had
engaged for, but which I was ruefully to miss on coming to know and love
the place in after years. Then it was I felt how long before my
attachment had started on its course--that closer vision was no
beginning, it only took up the tale; just as it comes to me again
to-day, at the end of time, that the contemplative monk seated on a
terrace in the foreground, a constant friend of my childhood, must have
been of the convent of San Miniato, which gives me the site from which
the painter wrought. We had Italy again in the corresponding room
behind--a great abundance of Italy I was free to think while I revolved
between another large landscape over the sofa and the classic marble
bust on a pedestal between the two back windows, the figure, a part of
the figure, of a lady with her head crowned with vine-leaves and her
hair disposed with a laxity that was emulated by the front of her dress,
as my next younger brother exposed himself to my derision by calling the
bit of brocade (simulated by the chisel) that, depending from a single
shoulder-strap, so imperfectly covered her. This image was known and
admired among us as the Bacchante; she had come to us straight from an
American studio in Rome, and I see my horizon flush again with the first
faint dawn of conscious appreciation, or in other words of the critical
spirit, while two or three of the more restrictive friends of the house
find our marble lady very "cold" for a Bacchante. Cold indeed she must
have been--quite as of the tombstone temperament; but that objection
would drop if she might only be called a Nymph, since nymphs were mild
and moderate, and since discussion of a work of art mainly hung in those
days on that issue of the producible _name_. I fondly recall, by the
same token, that playing on a certain occasion over the landscape above
the sofa, restrictive criticism, uttered in my indulged hearing,
introduced me to what had probably been my very first chan