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June 8th. I went this morning to the Uffizi gallery. The entrance is from the great court of the palace, which communicates with Lung' Arno at one end, and with the Grand Ducal Piazza at the other.
The Arno formed lagoons, upon which the moon, half veiled, shone fitfully. He walked through the water and the mud, with a step rapid, blind, like that of one intoxicated. She took fright and shouted. She called him. But he did not turn his head and made no answer. He fled with alarming recklessness. She ran after him.
By birth a Tuscan, the new Nuncio had distinguished himself from boyhood by his passionate attachment to his studies. At Bologna, at Perugia, and at Rome, his intense application brought him early honours, and early physical debility. His health, partially restored in the seclusion of his native valley of the Arno, enabled him to return again to Rome.
"Ah, they are what you call thoughtful for themselves, very high, and very few people are quite as good, so we had little quarrels, and then a big one, because he said he would throw my pearls into the Arno. I hid them, and he could not find them. If he had found them and thrown them away I would have killed him."
He strolled along down the Arno, feeling flat and mean, as a man always does after a contest with a woman in which he has got the victory; our sex can preserve its self-respect only through defeat in such a case. It gave him no pleasure to remember that the glamour of the night before seemed still to rest on Imogene unbroken; that, indeed, was rather an added pain.
I have now to tell you that you were made fatherless by the perfidy of man, not by the dispensation of Heaven. "Twenty-three years ago, I accompanied my father in a tour through Germany and Italy. Grief for the death of my mother had impaired his health, and the physicians ordered him to reside in a warmer climate; accordingly we fixed ourselves near the Arno.
For thirty years she had not once gone out of her palace on the Arno, where, she painted, and wearing a wig, she played the guitar in her spacious white salon. She received the best society of Florence, and Miss Bell often called on her.
"And as the people had now taken state and signory on themselves, they ordered, for greater strength of the people, that all the towers of Florence and there were many 180 feet high should be cut down to 75 feet, and no more; and so it was done, and with the stones of them they walled the city on the other side Arno." That last sentence is a significant one.
Yes, I shall look over the near olives across the valley to the hill of cypresses, to the poplars beside Arno that tremble with joy; and first I shall see Torre del Gallo and then S. Miniato, that strange and beautiful place, and at last my eyes will rest on the city herself, beautiful in the mist of morning: first the tower of S. Croce, like a tufted spear; then the tower of Liberty, and that was built for pride; and at last, like a mysterious rose lifted above the city, I shall see the dome, the rosy dome of Brunellesco, beside which, like a slim lily, pale, immaculate as a pure virgin, rises the inviolate Tower of the Lowly, that Giotto built for God.
In the midst of a wood of evergreens on the banks of the Arno, a man young, handsome, and splendidly attired has thrown himself upon the ground, where he writhes like a stricken serpent, in horrible convulsions. He is the prey of a demoniac excitement: an appalling consternation is on him madness is in his brain his mind is on fire.
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