and
beauty, which you may find everywhere in the country round about
Florence, is the true Tuscany. The vulgarity of the city, for even in
Italy the city life has become insincere, blatant, and for the most part
a life of the middle class, seldom reaches an hundred yards beyond the
_barriera_: and this is a charm in Florence, for you may so easily look
on her from afar. And so, if one comes to her from the country, or
returns to her from her own hills, it is ever with a sense of loss, of
sadness, of regret: she has lost her soul for the sake of the stranger,
she has forgotten the splendid past for an ignoble present, a strangely
wearying dream of the future.

Yet for all her modern ways, her German beer-houses, her English
tea-shops, her noisy trams on Lung' Arno, her air as of a museum, her
eagerness to show her contempt for the stranger while she sells him her
very soul for money, Florence remains one of the most delightful cities
of Italy to visit, to live with, to return to again and again. Yet I for
one would never live within her walls if I could help it, nor herd with
those barbarian, exclamatory souls who in guttural German or cockney
English snort or neigh at the beauties industriously pointed out by a
loud-voiced cicerone, quoting in American all the appropriate
quotations, Browning before Filippo Lippi, Ruskin in S. Croce, Mrs.
Browning at the door of S. Felice, Goethe everywhere.

No, I will live a little way out of the city on the hillside, perhaps
towards Settignano, not too far from the pine woods, nor too near the
gate. And my garden there shall be a vineyard, bordered with iris, and
among the vines shall be a garden of olives, and under the olives there
shall be the corn. And the yellow roses will litter the courtyard, and
the fountain will be full of their petals, and the red roses will strew
the paths, and the white roses will fall upon the threshold; and all day
long the bees will linger in the passion-flowers by the window when the
mulberry trees have been stripped of leaves, and the lilies of Madonna,
before the vines, are tall and like ghosts in the night, the night that
is blue and gold, where a few fire-flies linger yet, sailing faintly
over the stream, and the song of the cicale is the burden of endless
summer.

Then very early in the morning I will rise from my bed under the holy
branch of olive, I will walk in my garden before the sun is high, I will
look on my beloved city. Yes, I shall