rple peaks of the Carrara mountains far
away. But when the road reaches the base of the steep hill on which the
old Etruscans built their crow's-nest of a city--where Catiline gathered
his host of desperadoes, and under whose shadow, more than three
centuries later, the last of the Roman deliverers, himself a barbarian,
hurled back the hordes of Radegast--it winds a narrow and tortuous way
from valley to crest, from terrace to terrace, until the crowning stage
is reached.

Here in the shadow of the old Etruscan fortifications, the wayfarer
might take his stand and look down upon the wondrous scene beneath him.
"Never," as Hallam says, "could the sympathies of the soul with outward
nature be more finely touched; never could more striking suggestions be
presented to the philosopher and the statesman" than in this Tuscan
cradle of so much of our modern civilization, which even the untraveled
islander of the northern seas can picture in his mind and cherish with
lively affection. For was it not on this fertile soil of Etruria that
the art and letters of Italy had birth? and was it not in fair Florence,
rather than in any other modern city, that they were born again in the
fulness of time? Almost on the very spot where Stilicho vainly stemmed
the advancing tide which was to reduce Rome to a city of ruins, the new
light dawned after a millennium of darkness. And there, from the sacred
walls of Florence, Dante taught our earlier and later poets to sing;
Galileo reawoke slumbering science with a trumpet-call which frightened
the Inquisition out of its senses; Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, Da Vinci,
Del Sarto created models of art for all succeeding time. Never was there
in any region of the world such a focus of illuminating fire. Never will
there live a race that does not own its debt to the great seers and
creators of Tuscany.

Late on an autumn afternoon, towards the close of the September of 1882,
four English friends have driven out from Florence to Fiesole, and,
after lingering for a time in the strange old city, examining the
Cathedral in the Piazza and the remains of the Roman Theatre in the
garden behind it, they came slowly down the hill to the beautiful old
villa which was once the abode of Lorenzo the Magnificent. The carriage
waited for them in the road, but here, on the terrace outside the villa
gates, they rested awhile, feasting their eyes upon the lovely scene
which lay below.

They had visited the place before