f, let us
hope. In visions of the Madonna they grew blind to the meaning of a
woman's smile, and illuminating the golden olive wreath above the heads
of saints they lost the laughter of the children under the homely
olive-trees without.

But they did a noble work in their day; and leisure for meditation is no
mean treasure, though the modern world does not number it amongst its
joys.

One can understand how men born with nervous frames and spiritual
fancies into the world when it was one vast battle-ground, where its
thrones were won by steel and poison, and its religion enforced by torch
and faggot, grew so weary of the never-ending turmoil, and of the
riotous life which was always either a pageant or a slaughter-house,
that it seemed beautiful to them to withdraw themselves into some
peaceful place like this Badia and spend their years in study and in
recommendation of their souls to God, with the green and fruitful fields
before their cloister windows, and no intruders on the summer stillness
as they painted their dreams of a worthier and fairer world except the
blue butterflies that strayed in on a sunbeam, or the gold porsellini
that hummed at the lilies in the Virgin's chalice.

* * *

Florence, where she sits throned amidst her meadows white with Lenten
lilies, Florence is never terrible, Florence is never old. In her
infancy they fed her on the manna of freedom, and that fairest food gave
her eternal youth. In her early years she worshipped ignorantly indeed,
but truly always the day-star of liberty; and it has been with her
always so that the light shed upon her is still as the light of
morning.

Does this sound a fanciful folly? Nay, there is a real truth in it.

The past is so close to you in Florence. You touch it at every step. It
is not the dead past that men bury and then forget. It is an
unquenchable thing; beautiful, and full of lustre, even in the tomb,
like the gold from the sepulchres of the AEtruscan kings that shines on
the breast of some fair living woman, undimmed by the dust and the
length of the ages.

The music of the old greatness thrills through all the commonest things
of life like the grilli's chant through the wooden cages on Ascension
Day; and, like the song of the grilli, its poetry stays in the warmth of
the common hearth for the ears of the little children, and loses nothing
of its melody.

The beauty of the past in Florence is like the beauty of the grea