herbs tossed down together in a Tre Cento window, some gigantic mass of
blossoms being borne aloft on men's shoulders for a church festivity of
roses, something at every step that has some beauty or some charm in it,
some graciousness of the ancient time, or some poetry of the present
hour.

The beauty of the past goes with you at every step in Florence. Buy eggs
in the market, and you buy them where Donatello bought those which fell
down in a broken heap before the wonder of the crucifix. Pause in a
narrow bye-street in a crowd and it shall be that Borgo Allegri, which
the people so baptized for love of the old painter and the new-born art.
Stray into a great dark church at evening time, where peasants tell
their beads in the vast marble silence, and you are where the whole city
flocked, weeping, at midnight to look their last upon the face of their
Michael Angelo. Pace up the steps of the palace of the Signoria and you
tread the stone that felt the feet of him to whom so bitterly was known
"_com' e duro calle, lo scendere e'l salir per l'altrui scale_." Buy a
knot of March anemoni or April arum lilies, and you may bear them with
you through the same city ward in which the child Ghirlandajo once
played amidst the gold and silver garlands that his father fashioned for
the young heads of the Renaissance. Ask for a shoemaker and you shall
find the cobbler sitting with his board in the same old twisting,
shadowy street way, where the old man Toscanelli drew his charts that
served a fair-haired sailor of Genoa, called Columbus. Toil to fetch a
tinker through the squalor of San Niccolo, and there shall fall on you
the shadow of the bell-tower where the old sacristan saved to the world
the genius of the Night and Day. Glance up to see the hour of the
evening time, and there, sombre and tragical, will loom above you the
walls of the communal palace on which the traitors were painted by the
brush of Sarto, and the tower of Giotto, fair and fresh in its perfect
grace as though angels had builded it in the night just past, "_ond'
ella toglie ancora e terza e nona_," as in the noble and simple days
before she brake the "_cerchia antica_."

Everywhere there are flowers, and breaks of songs, and rills of
laughter, and wonderful eyes that look as if they too, like their Poets,
had gazed into the heights of heaven and the depths of hell.

And then you will pass out at the gates beyond the city walls, and all
around you there will