United States or Dominica ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


They ascend perpendicularly, incline like Pisa's leaning tower, or are beat at various angles, but always retaining the columnar form. They rise to great heights and vanish in space. These spectral forms are caused by small local whirlwinds when the air is otherwise calm, and are, apparently, without purpose, unless they are intended merely to amuse the casual observer.

Fly, Echo, to Persephone's dark-walled home, and to his father bear the noble tidings, that seeing him thou mayest speak to him of his son, saying that for his father's honour in Pisa's famous valley he hath crowned his boyish hair with garlands from the glorious games. In the year 480, the year of Salamis, the Syracusans under Hieron had defeated the Carthaginians in the great battle of Himera.

I had seen Santa Maria della Pieve and its campanile of quaint colonnades, the stately, dusky cathedral grass-plotted and residenced about almost after the fashion of an English "close" and John of Pisa's elaborate marble shrine; I had seen the museum and its Etruscan vases and majolica platters.

These endless cannon, thrust into pits which search into the fiery entrails of the earth, and stand there upright, hardly leaning so much as Pisa's tower; and these slanting tubes, long as factory chimneys, so long that perspective distorts their lines and sometimes splays them like the trumpets of Apocalypse these are not cannon; they are machine-guns, fed by continuous ribbons of trains which scoop out in entire regions and upon a country, if need be mountains of profundity.

Join Theron boldly to their sacred names; Theron the next honour claims; Theron to no man gives place, Is first in Pisa's and in Virtue's race; Theron there, and he alone, Ev'n his own swift forefathers has outgone." One of the company exclaimed, with the full assent of the rest, that if the original were madder than this, it must be incurably mad.

But Cesare, boundless in audacity, most swift to determine and to act, was not impulsive. Cold reason, foresight and calculation were the ministers of his indomitable will. He looked ahead and beyond in the matter of Pisa's offer, and he perceived the danger that might await him in the acceptance. The time for that was not yet.

Momma and I both liked the idea of a river in town scenery, and thought it might be copied with advantage in America, it afforded such a good excuse for bridges. Pisa's three arched stone ones made a reason for settling there in themselves in our opinion. The Senator, however, was against it on conservancy grounds, and asked us what we thought of the population of Pisa.

The first sight of these strange fanes has queer resemblances to the first sight of that lonely and secret group by Pisa's walls. It came upon me, at that moment, that they could not have been dreamed and made without some nobility. Perhaps the hour lent them sanctity.

Yet it is extremely important. The same fortuitous event passes by millions of men without exciting anything. How many of Pisa's inhabitants had seen the lamp of their cathedral before Galileo! He does not necessarily find who wants to find. The happy chance comes only to those worthy of it.

We viewed, of course, the exterior of the edifice standing on the site of the Tower of Famine, where the cruel archbishop starved the Count Ugolino and his grandchildren to death; and we drove by the buildings of Pisa's famous university, which we afterward fancied rather pervaded the city with the young and ardent life of its students.