. And indeed Erminia was one that to see was to love. I for my
part had seen all the statues in Rome, Muses, Venuses, Minervas, no
small master-pieces, but such triumphs of art as the world cannot
equal. And yet, between ourselves, utter failures compared to what
nature had done. Look you, friend,"--and so saying the little man
jumped up and raised his arm--"she was so tall, about a head taller
than I am, but so beautifully formed; her little head so gracefully set
on her magnificent bust, that no one found out how tall she was. And
then her face, chiselled as it were, with large eyes richly eyelashed,
and an expression proud and sweet both; a mouth red as a strawberry,
or rather the inside of a white fig, and her brow crowned with thick
blue-black curly hair, which she bound up behind into such a heavy nest
of ringlets that it needed as stately a throat as hers to bear their
burden. And then when she moved, walked, raised her arms to steady the
basket she carried on her head, with her taper fingers turned, as
it were, out of ivory; and her little feet in their coarse wooden
shoes--_amico mio_, if I had not been a poet, that girl would have made
me one. As for the others who had not a drop of poet blood in their
veins, at least she made them mad, which is half-way to the Temple of
Apollo. There was not a young fellow in the place who would not have
had his left hand cut off, if only he might have worn her ring on the
right. But she would listen to none of them, which was the more
surprising when you considered the poverty she lived in, and that of
the offers made to her, the very worst would at least have saved her,
her mother, and her sister from any further distress. Of myself I will
not speak. Madly in love as I was, I had still sense enough left to see
that I was not worthy of her, and after I had in some degree got over
the pain of my rejection, I told her that I would at least be her
friend at all times, and she gave me her hand, and thanked me with such
a smile. Sir, at that moment I was more crazy than ever! But there was
another that everybody thought would outbid us all, and although we
might have grudged her to him, still we should not have had a word to
say against her choice. This was the son of the landlord of the _Croce
d'oro_, a handsome fellow, rolling in money, and about two-and-twenty,
a couple of inches taller than Erminia; generally called Barbarossa, or
merely _Il Rosso_, on account of his having wit