he end be paid back to you, no doubt, when you
are worn out, and what you do is as worthless as the rustling canes that
blow together in autumn by dull river sides: then you scrawl your
signature across your soulless work, and it fetches thrice its weight in
gold.

But though you thus have your turn, and can laugh at your will at the
world that you fool, what can that compensate you for all those dear
dead darlings?--those bright first-fruits, those precious earliest
nestlings of your genius, which had to be sold into bondage for a broken
crust, which drifted away from you never to be found again, which you
know well were a million fold better, fresher, stronger, higher, better
than anything you have begotten since then; and yet in which none could
be found to believe, only because you had not won that magic spell which
lies in--being known?

* * *

When I think of the sweet sigh of the violin melodies through the white
winter silence of Raffaelino's eager, dreamy eyes, misty with the
student's unutterable sadness and delight; of old Ambrogio, with his
semicircle of children round him, lifting their fresh voices at his
word; of the little robin that came every day upon the waterpipe, and
listened, and thrilled in harmony, and ate joyfully the crumbs which the
old maestro daily spared to it from his scanty meal--when I think of
those hours, it seems to me that they must have been happiness too.

"Could we but know when we are happy!" sighs some poet. As well might
he write, "Could we but set the dewdrop with our diamonds! could we but
stay the rainbow in our skies!"

* * *

Every old Italian city has this awe about it--holds close the past and
moves the living to a curious sense that they are dead and in their
graves are dreaming; for the old cities themselves have beheld so much
perish around them, and yet have kept so firm a hold upon tradition and
upon the supreme beauty of great arts, that those who wander there grow,
as it were, bewildered, and know not which is life and which is death
amongst them.

* * *

The sun was setting.

Over the whole Valdarno there was everywhere a faint ethereal golden
mist that rose from the water and the woods.

The town floated on it as upon a lake; her spires, and domes, and
towers, and palaces bathed at their base in its amber waves, and rising
upward into the rose-hued radiance of the upper air. The mountains that