-flourished in
that sunny place: it was not really wonderful that Ippolita the
stone-cutter's daughter, classically fair, indisputably a beauty, should
win all seeing eyes and be the despair of all rhymers. Given the vision
to the visionary (and both came in their time), she might be trusted
with the rest; for she was remarkable by contrast; there were none like
her. The Paduan girls are all charming, and mostly pretty. Ippolita was
neither: she was beautiful, and when you came to know her face, lovely.
They are brown, she was fair; they are little, she was very tall. They
have eyes like a dove's, glossed brown; hers were deeply blue, the
colour of the Adriatic when a fleeting cloud spreads a curtain of
hyacinth over the sheeted turquoise bed. Beautifully hued in mingled red
and white, delicately shaped, pliant, supple, and shy, such as she was
(an honest, good girl, Heaven knows!) she might have lived and died in
her alley--sweetheart of some half dozen decent fellows, wife of the
most masterful, mother of a dozen brats, unnoticed save for her
qualities of cheerful drudge and brood-mare; beautiful as a spring leaf
till twenty, ripe as a peach on the wall till thirty, keen-faced and
wise, mother and grandmother, at forty; and so on--such she might have
lived and died, and been none the worse for her reclusion, had she not
leaned more than half out of her window in the _Vicolo_ one bright April
morning of her sixteenth year, to exchange lively banter with a friend
below, and been seen by Messer Alessandro del Dardo, who within the
cuirass of Sub-Prefect of Padua nourished the heart of an approved Poet;
been seen of him for the miracle of young beauty she really was. Chance
sparks kindle chance tinder; and so here. I am far from alleging the
heart of Messer Alessandro to be dry tow; but I do repeat it, Padua was
a freakish cityful, Ippolita lovely exceedingly, amorous poetry in the
air.

He, then, passing by, saw her stoop flushed and sparkling from above
him; the sun caught her shining hair; a loose white smock revealed so
much of her neck as to picture him the snowy rest. Snow and rosebuds--O
ye little gods! As he stood in ecstasy she saw him at the end of the
lane, and blushing drew back with a finger in her mouth, to thrill and
giggle at ease. She saw a great gentleman stare; he saw a rosy goddess
stoop and laugh, then blush and hide. _Vitas hinnuleo me similis,
Chloe!_ Away he went, his heart leaping like a wood-fire