encircled her took all the varying hues of the sunset on their pale
heights until they flushed to scarlet, glowered to violet, wavered with
flame, and paled to whiteness, as the opal burns and fades. Warmth,
fragrance, silence, loveliness encompassed her; and in the great
stillness the bell of the basilica tolled slowly the evening call to
prayer.

Thus Florence rose before me.

A strange tremor of exceeding joy thrilled through me as I beheld the
reddened shadows of those close-lying roofs, and those marble heights of
towers and of temples. At last my eyes gazed on her! the daughter of
flowers, the mistress of art, the nursing mother of liberty and of
aspiration.

I fell on my knees and thanked God. I pity those who, in such a moment,
have not done likewise.

* * *

There is nothing upon earth, I think, like the smile of Italy as she
awakes when the winter has dozed itself away in the odours of its
oakwood fires.

The whole land seems to laugh.

The springtide of the north is green and beautiful, but it has nothing
of the radiance, the dreamfulness, the ecstasy of spring in the southern
countries. The springtide of the north is pale with the gentle
colourless sweetness of its world of primroses; the springtide of Italy
is rainbow-hued, like the profusion of anemones that laugh with it in
every hue of glory under every ancient wall and beside every hill-fed
stream.

Spring in the north is a child that wakes from dreams of death; spring
in the south is a child that wakes from dreams of love. One is rescued
and welcomed from the grave; but the other comes smiling on a sunbeam
from heaven.

* * *

The landscape that has the olive is spiritual as no landscape can ever
be from which the olive is absent; for where is there spirituality
without some hue of sadness?

But this spiritual loveliness is one for which the human creature that
is set amidst it needs a certain education as for the power of
Euripides, for the dreams of Phaedrus, for the strength of Michaelangelo,
for the symphonies of Mozart or Beethoven.

The mind must itself be in a measure spiritualised ere aright it can
receive it.

It is too pure, too impalpable, too nearly divine, to be grasped by
those for whom all beauty centres in strong heats of colour and great
breadths of effect; it floats over the senses like a string of perfect
cadences in music; it has a breath of heaven in it; though on the earth