ng, not being well enough to go to the
Cascine, I remained at home. I sat down at the window and read
Foscolo's beautiful poem, "I sepoleri:" the subject of my book, and
the sight of Alfieri's house meeting my eye whenever I looked up,
inspired the idea of visiting the Santa Croce again, and I ventured
out unattended. The streets, and particularly the Lung' Arno, were
crowded with gay people in their holiday costumes. Not even our Hyde
Park, on a summer Sunday, ever presented a more lively spectacle or a
better dressed mob. I was often tempted to turn back rather than
encounter this moving multitude; but at length I found my way to the
Santa Croce, which presented a very different scene. The service was
over; and a few persons were walking up and down the aisles, or
kneeling at different altars. In a chapel on the other side of the
cloisters, they were chanting the Via Crucis; and the blended voices
swelled and floated round, then died away, then rose again, and at
length sunk into silence. The evening was closing fast, the shadows of
the heavy pillars grew darker and darker, the tapers round the high
altar twinkled in the distance like dots of light, and the tombs of
Michel Angelo, of Galileo, of Machiavelli, and Alfieri, were projected
from the deep shadow in indistinct formless masses: but I needed not
to see them to image them before me; for with each and all my fancy
was familiar. I spent about an hour walking up and down--abandoned to
thoughts which were melancholy, but not bitter. All memory, all
feeling, all grief, all pain were swallowed up in the sublime
tranquillity which was within me and around me. How could I think of
myself, and of the sorrow which swells at my impatient heart, while
all of genius that could die, was sleeping round me; and the spirits
of the glorious dead--they who rose above their fellow men by the
might of intellect--whose aim was excellence, the noble end "that made
ambition virtue," were, or seemed to me, present?--and if those tombs
could have opened their ponderous and marble jaws, what histories of
sufferings and persecution, wrongs and wretchedness, might they not
reveal! Galileo--

"chi vide
Sotto l'etereo padiglion rotarsi
Piu mondi, e il sole iradiarli immoto."

pining in the dungeons of the inquisition; Machiavelli,

"quel grande,
Che temprando lo scettro a'regnatori,
Gil allor ne sfronda----"

tortured and proscri