ce, on such
ground, for active participation. The picture, from the hand of a
French painter, M. Lefevre, and of but slightly scanter extent than the
work of Mr. Cole, represented in frank rich colours and as a so-called
"view in Tuscany" a rural scene of some exuberance, a broken and
precipitous place, amid mountains and forests, where two or three
bare-legged peasants or woodmen were engaged, with much emphasis of
posture, in felling a badly gashed but spreading oak by means of a tense
rope attached to an upper limb and at which they pulled together.
"Tuscany?--are you sure it's Tuscany?" said the voice of restrictive
criticism, that of the friend of the house who in the golden age of the
precursors, though we were still pretty much precursors, had lived
longest in Italy. And then on my father's challenge of this demur: "Oh
in Tuscany, you know, the colours are much softer--there would be a
certain haze in the atmosphere." "Why, of course," I can hear myself now
blushingly but triumphantly intermingle--"the softness and the haze of
our Florence there: isn't Florence in Tuscany?" It had to be parentally
admitted that Florence was--besides which our friend had been there and
knew; so that thereafter, within our walls, a certain _malaise_ reigned,
for if the Florence was "like it" then the Lefevre couldn't be, and if
the Lefevre was like it then the Florence couldn't: a lapse from old
convenience--as from the moment we couldn't name the Lefevre where were
we? All of which it might have been open to me to feel I had uncannily
promoted.

XX

My own sense of the great matter, meanwhile--that is of our
possibilities, still more than of our actualities, of Italy in general
and of Florence in particular--was a perfectly recoverable little
awareness, as I find, of certain mild soft irregular breathings thence
on the part of an absent pair in whom our parents were closely
interested and whose communications, whose Roman, Sorrentine, Florentine
letters, letters in especial from the Baths of Lucca, kept open, in our
air, more than any other sweet irritation, that "question of Europe"
which was to have after all, in the immediate years, so limited, so
shortened, a solution. Mary Temple the elder had, early in our
Fourteenth Street period, married Edmund Tweedy, a haunter of that
neighbourhood and of our house in it from the first, but never more than
during a winter spent with us there by that quasi-relative, who, by an