of a quality so
different that one hushed one's breath to hear. It might be fancied to
be the voice of one of those kingly archangels that one sees drawn by
the old Florentine religious artists,--a voice grave and unearthly, and
with a plaintive undertone of divine mystery.

The monk and the cavalier bent low in their saddles, and seemed to join
devoutly in the worship of the hour.

One need not wonder at the enthusiasm of the returning pilgrim of those
days for the city of his love, who feels the charm that lingers around
that beautiful place even in modern times. Never was there a spot
to which the heart could insensibly grow with a more home-like
affection,--never one more thoroughly consecrated in every stone by the
sacred touch of genius.

A republic, in the midst of contending elements, the history of
Florence, in the Middle Ages, was a history of what shoots and blossoms
the Italian nature might send forth, when rooted in the rich soil
of liberty. It was a city of poets and artists. Its statesmen, its
merchants, its common artisans, and the very monks in its convents, were
all pervaded by one spirit. The men of Florence in its best days were
men of a large, grave, earnest mould. What the Puritans of New England
wrought out with severest earnestness in their reasonings and their
lives these early Puritans of Italy embodied in poetry, sculpture, and
painting. They built their Cathedral and their Campanile, as the Jews
of old built their Temple, with awe and religious fear, that they might
thus express by costly and imperishable monuments their sense of God's
majesty and beauty. The modern traveller who visits the churches and
convents of Florence, or the museums where are preserved the fading
remains of its early religious Art, if he be a person of any
sensibility, cannot fail to be affected with the intense gravity and
earnestness which pervade them. They seem less to be paintings for the
embellishment of life than eloquent picture-writing by which burning
religious souls sought to preach the truths of the invisible world to
the eye of the multitude. Through all the deficiencies of perspective,
coloring, and outline incident to the childhood and early youth of Art,
one feels the passionate purpose of some lofty soul to express ideas of
patience, self-sacrifice, adoration, and aspiration far transcending the
limits of mortal capability.

The angels and celestial beings of these grave old painters are as
differ