friend went on feverishly--"it
is not that! Look at his face, look at his face!"
Vanna looked. "Well," she asked, "what of his face?"
The _bambino_, to express his agony, was _grinning from ear to ear_.
This was the last miracle wrought by Madonna of the Peach-Tree.
IPPOLITA IN THE HILLS
I
THE GLORIOUS IPPOLITA
Almighty God, that supreme Architect, Who, alone among craftsmen, knows
when to give and when to stay the rein, has chosen the Plain of Emilia
to be, as it were, the garden of Italy, a garden set apart betwixt Alp
and Apennine to be adorned within a garden; has filled it with every
sort of fruit and herb and flowering tree; has watered it abundantly
with noble rivers; neither stinted it of deep shade nor removed it too
far from the timely stroke of the sun; has caused it, finally, to be
graced here and enriched there with divers great and grave cities. Man,
who has it not in him to be thrifty in so prodigal a midst, has here
also thought it lawful to go free. Out of that lake of rustling leaves
rise, like the masts of ships crowding a port, church towers, the
belfries of pious convents, the domes and turrets of great buildings
walled into cities. Among which, prized as they all are and honourably
additioned,--Vicenza, Treviso, Mantua, Verona, Ferrara,--there is none
more considerable than Padua, root of learning and grey cupolas, chosen
to be the last resting-place of Antenor, King Priam's brother, and the
first of Titus Livy.
It is of Padua that I am now called upon to report certain matters which
may seem strange to one who does not know her well: to the others,
_verbum satis_. Whether it is their University (too famous, perhaps, for
so quiet a place) or the suspiration of their greatest citizen which has
kindled their wits; whether that cauldron of brick, the _Santo_,
bubbling with silver domes, is the stem or flower of their exaltation;
whether their seat at the head of a sun-steeped marsh (at whose mouth is
Venice) hath itself unseated them; whether Petrarch set boiling what
Saint Antony could not allay; what it was, how it was, who gave them the
wrench, I know not--but the fact is that the people of Padua have been
as freakish a race as any in Italy; at the mercy of any head but the
aggregate's, pack-mules of a notion, galley-slaves of a whim, driven
hither and thither in a herd, like those restless leaves (souls once)
whose nearer sight first made Dante pitiful. Not that the
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