e tide of war rolled back to Novara; and now on
that crescent of her eastern cliffs, whence the full moon used to rise
through the bars of the cypresses in her burning summer twilights,
touching with soft increase of silver light the rosy marbles of her
balconies,--along the ridge of that encompassing rock, other circles are
increasing now, white and pale; walled towers of cruel strength,
sable-spotted with cannon-courses. I tell you, I have seen, when the
thunderclouds came down on those Italian hills, and all their crags were
dipped in the dark, terrible purple, as if the winepress of the wrath of
God had stained their mountain-raiment--I have seen the hail fall in
Italy till the forest branches stood stripped and bare as if blasted by
the locust; but the white hail never fell from those clouds of heaven as
the black hail will fall from the clouds of hell, if ever one breath of
Italian life stirs again in the streets of Verona.

78. Sad as you will feel this to be, I do not say that you can directly
prevent it; you cannot drive the Austrians out of Italy, nor prevent
them from building forts where they choose. But I do say,[11] that you,
and I, and all of us, ought to be both acting and feeling with a full
knowledge and understanding of these things; and that, without trying to
excite revolutions or weaken governments, we may give our own thoughts
and help, so as in a measure to prevent needless destruction. We should
do this, if we only realized the thing thoroughly. You drive out day by
day through your own pretty suburbs, and you think only of making, with
what money you have to spare, your gateways handsomer, and your
carriage-drives wider--and your drawing-rooms more splendid, having a
vague notion that you are all the while patronizing and advancing art;
and you make no effort to conceive the fact that, within a few hours'
journey of you, there are gateways and drawing-rooms which might just as
well be yours as these, all built already; gateways built by the
greatest masters of sculpture that ever struck marble; drawing-rooms,
painted by Titian and Veronese; and you won't accept nor save these as
they are, but you will rather fetch the house-painter from over the way,
and let Titian and Veronese house the rats.

[Note 11: The reader can hardly but remember Mrs. Browning's
beautiful appeal for Italy, made on the occasion of the first great
Exhibition of Art in England:--

Magi of the east and of the west,