Legends of Florence Collected from the People, First Series

Angebote / Angebote:

Excerpt: ...of everything, that untravelled readers who peruse his pages in good faith must needs believe that in every church and palazzo there is a degree of picturesque magnificence, compared to which the Pandemonium of Milton, or even the Celestial City itself as seen by Saint John, is a mere cheap Dissenting chapel. According to him, Or' San Michele is by right "a world's wonder, and a gift so perfect to the whole world, that, passing it, one should need say (or be compelled to pronounce) a prayer for Taddeo's soul." Which is like the dentist in Paris, who proclaimed in 1847 that it was- "Presque une crime De ne pas crier, 'Vive Fattet!'" The legend, as told by this writer, and cited by Hare, is as follows: p. 130 "Surely nowhere in the world is the rugged, changeless, mountain force of hewn stone piled against the sky, and the luxuriant, dream-like poetic delicacy of stone carven and shaped into leafage and loveliness, more perfectly blended and made one than where San Michele rises out of the dim, many-coloured, twisting streets, in its mass of ebon darkness and of silvery light. "The other day, under the walls of it, I stood and looked at its Saint George, where he leans upon his shield, so calm, so young, with his bared head and his quiet eyes. "'That is our Donatello's, ' said a Florentine beside me-a man of the people, who drove a horse for hire in the public ways, and who paused, cracking his whip, to tell this tale to me. 'Donatello did that, and it killed him. Do you not know? When he had done that Saint George he showed it to his master. And the master said, "It wants one thing only." Now this saying our Donatello took gravely to heart, chiefly because his master would never explain where the fault lay, and so much did it hurt him, that he fell ill of it, and came nigh to death. Then he called his master to him. "Dear and...