on the Lung
Arno, close to the Ponte Santa Trinita, in Florence. The situation is
one of the most delightful in Florence: across the narrow quay the
windows look almost sheer down into the river, sparkling with a hundred
facets in the spring and summer sunlight, cut by the deep shadows of the
old bridges, to where it is lost to sight between the tall poplars by
the Greve mouth and the ilexes and elms of the Cascine, closed in by
the pale blue peaks of the Carrara Alps; or else, in autumn and winter,
scarcely moving, a mass of dark-greens and browns, wonderfully veined,
like some strange oriental jasper, with transparent violet streakings,
and above which arise, veiled, half washed out by mist, the old
corbelled houses, the church-steeples and roofs, the tiers and tiers of
pine and ilex plumes on the hill opposite.

For a moment, with the full luminousness of the Tuscan sky once more
in his eyes, and the guttural strength of the Tuscan language once more
in his ears, Alfieri seems to have been delighted. But his cheerfulness
was not of long duration. Ever since his great illness at Colmar,
Alfieri had, I feel persuaded, become virtually an old man; his strength
and spirits were impaired, and the strange morose depression of his
half-fructified youth seemed to return. Coming at that moment, the
disappointment, the terror, the horror of the French Revolution became,
so to speak, part of a moral illness which lasted to his death. Alfieri
was not a tender-hearted nor a humane man; had he been, he would have
felt more sympathy than he did with the beginning of the great movement,
with the strivings after reform which preceded it; he had, on the
contrary, the sort of cold continuous rage, the ruthless self-righteousness
and cut-and-dryness which would have made him, had he been a Frenchman,
a terrorist of the most dreadful type; a regular routinist in extermination
of corrupt people. Hence I cannot believe that, much as he may have been
shocked by the news of the September massacres, of the _grandes
fournees_ which preceded Thermidor, and much as he may have been
distressed by Mme. d'Albany's anxiety and grief for so many friends who
lost their property or life, Alfieri was the man to be driven mad by
the mere thought of bloodshed. But Alfieri had, ever since his earliest
youth, made liberty his goddess, and the worship of liberty his special
religion and mission. That such a religion and mission, to which he had
devoted himse