shepherd built for her in such fashion that the belfry
has been the Pharos of Art for five centuries.

Here is the secret of Florence--supreme aspiration.

The aspiration which gave her citizens force to live in poverty, and
clothe themselves in simplicity, so as to be able to give up their
millions of florins to bequeath miracles in stone and metal and colour
to the Future. The aspiration which so purified her soil, red with
carnage, black with smoke of war, trodden continuously by hurrying feet
of labourers, rioters, mercenaries, and murderers, that from that soil
there could spring, in all its purity and perfection, the
paradise-blossom of the Vita Nuova.

Venice perished for her pride and carnal lust; Rome perished for her
tyrannies and her blood-thirst; but Florence--though many a time nearly
strangled under the heel of the Empire and the hand of the
Church--Florence was never slain utterly either in body or soul;
Florence still crowned herself with flowers even in her throes of agony,
because she kept always within her that love--impersonal, consecrate,
void of greed--which is the purification of the individual life and the
regeneration of the body politic. "We labour for the ideal," said the
Florentines of old, lifting to heaven their red flower de luce--and to
this day Europe bows before what they did and cannot equal it.

"But she had so many great men, so many mighty masters!" I would urge,
whereon Pascarel would glance on me with his lightest and yet utmost
scorn.

"O wise female thing, who always traces the root to the branch and
deduces the cause from the effect! Did her great men spring up
full-armed like Athene, or was it the pure, elastic atmosphere of her
that made her mere mortals strong as immortals? The supreme success of
modern government is to flatten down all men into one uniform likeness,
so that it is only by most frightful, and often destructive, effort that
any originality can contrive to get loose in its own shape for a
moment's breathing space; but in the Commonwealth of Florence a man,
being born with any genius in him, drew in strength to do and dare
greatly with the very air he breathed."

Moreover, it was not only the great men that made her what she was.

It was, above all, the men who knew they were not great, but yet had the
patience and unselfishness to do their appointed work for her zealously,
and with every possible perfection in the doing of it.

It was not only Orcagna