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Second Series
by JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
To R.W. EMERSON.
A love and honor which more than thirty years have deepened, thoughpriceless to him they enrich, are of little import to one capable ofinspiring them. Yet I cannot deny myself the pleasure of so far intrudingon your reserve as at least to make public acknowledgment of the debt Ican never repay.
On the banks of a little river so shrunken by the suns of summer that itseems fast passing into a tradition, but swollen by the autumnal rainswith an Italian suddenness of passion till the massy bridge shuddersunder the impatient heap of waters behind it, stands a city which, in itsperiod of bloom not so large as Boston, may well rank next to Athens inthe history which teaches come l' uom s' eterna.
Originally only a convenient spot in the valley where the fairs of theneighboring Etruscan city of Fiesole were held, it gradually grew from ahuddle of booths to a town, and then to a city, which absorbed itsancestral neighbor and became a cradle for the arts, the letters, thescience, and the commerce[2] of modern Europe. For her Cimabue wrought,who infused Byzantine formalism with a suggestion of nature and feeling;for her the Pisani, who divined at least, if they could not conjure withit, the secret of Greek supremacy in sculpture; for her the marvellousboy Ghiberti proved that unity of composition and grace of figure anddrapery were never beyond the reach of genius;[3] for her Brunelleschicurved the dome which Michel Angelo hung in air on St. Peter's; for herGiotto reared the bell-tower graceful as an Horatian ode in marble; andthe great triumvirate of Italian poetry, good sense, and culture calledher mother. There is no modern city about which cluster so many elevatingassociations, none in which the past is so contemporary with us inunchanged buildings and undisturbed monuments. The house of Dante isstill shown; children still receive baptism at the font (il mio bel SanGiovanni) where he was christened before the acorn dropped that was togrow into a keel for Columbus; and an inscribed stone marks the spotwhere he used to sit and watch the slow blocks swing up to complete themaster-thought of Arnolfo. In the convent of St. Mark hard by lived andlabored Beato Angelico, the saint of Christian art, and Fra Bartolommeo,who taught Raphael dignity. From the same walls Savonarola went forth tohis triumphs, short-lived almost as the crackle of his martyrdom. Theplain little chamber of Michel Angelo seems still to expect his return;his last sketches lie upon the table, his staff leans in the corner, andhis slippers wait before the empty chair. On one of the vine-clad hills,just without the city walls, one's feet may press the same stairs thatMilton climbed to visit Galileo. To an American there is somethingsupremely impressive in this cumulative influence of the past full ofinspiration and rebuke, something saddening in this repeated proof thatmoral supremacy is the only one that leaves monuments and not ruinsbehind it. Time, who with us obliterates the labor and often the names ofyesterday, seems here to have spared almost the prints of the carepiante that shunned the sordid paths of worldly honor.
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