compared with this master's frescos in the Chapel of the
Annunziata,--which, indeed, is in every way a place of wonder and
delight. You reach it by passing through a garden lane bordered with
roses, and a taciturn gardener comes out with clinking keys, and lets
you into the chapel, where there is nobody but Giotto and Dante, nor
seems to have been for ages. Cool it is, and of a pulverous smell, as a
sacred place should be; a blessed benching goes round the wall, and you
sit down and take unlimited comfort in the frescos. The gardener leaves
you alone to the solitude and the silence, in which the talk of the
painter and the exile is plain enough. Their contemporaries and yours
are cordial in their gay companionship; through the half-open door
falls, in a pause of the rain, the same sunshine that they saw lie
there; the deathless birds that they heard sing out in the garden trees;
it is the fresh sweetness of the grass mown six hundred years ago that
breathes through all the lovely garden grounds.

How mistaken was Ponce de Leon, to seek the fountain of youth in the New
World! It is there,--in the Old World,--far back in the past. We are all
old men and decrepit together in the present; the future is full of
death; in the past we are light and glad as boys turned barefoot in the
spring. The work of the heroes is play to us; the pang of the martyr is
a thrill of rapture; the exile's longing is a strain of plaintive music
touching and delighting us. We are not only young again, we are
immortal. It is this divine sense of superiority to fate which is the
supreme good won from travel in historic lands, and from the presence of
memorable things, and which no sublimity of natural aspects can bestow.
It is this which forms the wide difference between Europe and
America,--a gulf that it will take a thousand years to bridge.

It is a shame that the immortals should be limited in their pleasures by
the fact that they have hired their brougham by the hour; yet we early
quit the Chapel of Giotto on this account. We had chosen our driver from
among many other drivers of broughams in the vicinity of Pedrocchi's,
because he had such an honest look, and was not likely, we thought, to
deal unfairly with us.

"But first," said the signor who had selected him, "how much is your
brougham an hour?"

So and so.

"Show me the tariff of fares."

"There is no tariff."

"There is. Show it to me."

"It is lost, signor."

"I think not.