angeless, mountain force of hewn stone
piled against the sky, and the luxuriant, dreamlike, poetic delicacy of
stone carven and shaped into leafage and loveliness more perfectly
blended and made one than where Or San Michele rises out of the dim,
many-coloured, twisting streets, in its mass of ebon darkness and of
silvery light.

Well, the other day, under the walls of it I stood, and looked at its
Saint George where he leans upon his shield, so calm, so young, with his
bared head and his quiet eyes.

"That is our Donatello's," said a Florentine beside me--a man of the
people, who drove a horse for hire in the public ways, and who paused,
cracking his whip, to tell this tale to me. "Donatello did that, and it
killed him. Do you not know? When he had done that Saint George, he
showed it to his master. And the master said, 'It wants one thing only.'
Now this saying our Donatello took gravely to heart, chiefly of all
because his master would never explain where the fault lay; and so much
did it hurt him, that he fell ill of it, and came nigh to death. Then he
called his master to him. 'Dear and great one, do tell me before I die,'
he said, 'what is the one thing my statue lacks.' The master smiled, and
said, 'Only--speech.' 'Then I die happy,' said our Donatello. And he
died--indeed, that hour."

"Now, I cannot say that the pretty story is true; it is not in the least
true; Donato died when he was eighty-three, in the Street of the Melon;
and it was he himself who cried, 'Speak then--speak!' to his statue, as
it was carried through the city. But whether true or false the tale,
this fact is surely true, that it is well--nobly and purely well--with a
people when the men amongst it who ply for hire on its public ways think
caressingly of a sculptor dead five hundred years ago, and tell such a
tale standing idly in the noonday sun, feeling the beauty and the pathos
of it all.

"'Our Donatello' still to the people of Florence. 'Our own little
Donato' still, our pet and pride, even as though he were living and
working in their midst to-day, here in the shadows of the
Stocking-maker's Street, where his Saint George keeps watch and ward.

"'Our little Donato' still, though dead so many hundred years ago.

"That is glory, if you will. And something more beautiful than any
glory--Love."

He was silent a long while, gathering lazily with his left hand the arum
lilies to bind them together for me.

Perhaps the wish for the m