nificent Cosimo, as well as that of Michelozzo's
eminent skill in architecture."

It is not, however, the splendour of the palace, fine as it is, or the
memory of Cosimo even, that brings us to that beautiful house to-day,
but the work of Donatello in the courtyard, those marble medallions
copied from eight antique gems, and the little chapel on the second
floor, almost an afterthought you might think, since in a place full of
splendidly proportioned rooms, it is so cramped and cornered under the
staircase, where Benozzo Gozzoli has painted in fresco quite round the
walls, the Journey of the Three Kings, in which Cosimo himself, Piero
his son, and Lorenzo his grandson, then a golden-haired youth, ride
among the rest, in a procession that never finds the manger at
Bethlehem, is indeed not concerned with it, but is altogether occupied
with its own light-hearted splendour, and the beauty of the fair morning
among the Tuscan hills. Is it the pilgrimage of the Magi to the lowly
cot of Jesus that we find in that tiny dark chapel, or the journey of
man, awake now on the first morning of spring in quest of beauty? Over
the grass scattered with flowers, that gay company passes at dawn by
little white towns and grey towers, through woods where for a moment is
heard the song of some marvellous bird, past running streams, between
hedges of pomegranates and clusters of roses; and by the wayside rise
the stone-pine and the cypress, while over all is the far blue sky, full
of the sun, full of the wind, which is so soft that not a leaf has
trembled in the woods, nor the waters stirred in a single ripple. Truly
they are come to Tuscany where Beauty is, and are far from Bethlehem,
where Love lies sleeping. There on a mule, a black slave beside his
stirrup, rides Cosimo Pater Patriae, and beside him comes Piero his son,
attended too, and before them on a white horse stepping proudly, with
jewels in his cap, rides the golden-haired Lorenzo, the youngest of the
three kings, already magnificent, the darling of this world of hills and
streams, which one day he will sing better than anyone of his time. Not
thus came the Magi of the East across the deserts to stony Judaea, and
though the Emperor of the East be of them, and the Patriarch of
Constantinople another, we know it is to the knowledge of Plato they
would lead us, and not to the Sedes Sapientiae. And so it is before an
empty shrine that those clouds of angels sing; Madonna has fled away,