be a radiance and serenity of light that seems to
throb in its intensity and yet is divinely restful, like the passion and
the peace of love when it has all to adore and nothing to desire.

The water will be broad and gold, and darkened here and there into
shadows of porphyrine amber. Amidst the grey and green of the olive and
acacia foliage there will arise the low pale roofs and flat-topped
towers of innumerable villages.

Everywhere there will be a wonderful width of amethystine hills and
mystical depths of seven-chorded light. Above, masses of rosy cloud will
drift, like rose-leaves leaning on a summer wind. And, like a magic
girdle which has shut her out from all the curse of age and death and
man's oblivion, and given her a youth and loveliness which will endure
so long as the earth itself endures, there will be the circle of the
mountains, purple and white and golden, lying around Florence.

* * *

Amidst all her commerce, her wars, her hard work, her money-making,
Florence was always dominated and spiritualised, at her noisiest and
worst, by a poetic and picturesque imagination.

Florentine life had always an ideal side to it; and an idealism, pure
and lofty, runs through her darkest histories and busiest times like a
thread of gold through a coat of armour and a vest of frieze.

The Florentine was a citizen, a banker, a workman, a carder of wool, a
weaver of silk, indeed; but he was also always a lover, and always a
soldier; that is, always half a poet. He had his Caroccio and his
Ginevra as well as his tools and his sacks of florins. He had his sword
as well as his shuttle. His scarlet giglio was the flower of love no
less than the blazonry of battle on his standard, and the mint stamp of
the commonwealth on his coinage.

Herein lay the secret of the influence of Florence: the secret which
rendered the little city, stretched by her river's side, amongst her
quiet meadows white with arums, a sacred name to all generations of men
for all she dared and all she did.

"She amassed wealth," they say: no doubt she did--and why?

To pour it with both hands to melt in the foundries of Ghiberti--to
bring it in floods to cement the mortar that joined the marbles of
Brunelleschi! She always spent to great ends, and to mighty uses.

When she called a shepherd from his flocks in the green valley to build
for her a bell-tower so that she might hear, night and morning, the call
to the altar, the