Italy still remains the home of art, and it is but just she should keep these treasures, though the age that brought them forth has passed away.  They are her only support now; her people are dependent for their subsistence on the glory of the past.  The spirits of the old painters, living still on their canvass, earn from year to year the bread of an indigent and oppressed people.  This ought to silence those utilitarians at home, who oppose the cultivation of the fine arts, on the ground of their being useless luxuries.  Let them look to Italy, where a picture by Raphael or Correggio is a rich legacy for a whole city.  Nothing is useless that gratifies that perception of beauty, which is at once the most delicate and the most intense of our mental sensations, binding us by an unconscious link nearer to nature and to Him, whose every thought is born of Beauty, Truth and Love.  I envy not the one who looks with a cold and indifferent spirit on these immortal creations of the old masters—­these poems written in marble and on the canvass.  They who oppose every thing which can refine and spiritualize the nature of man, by binding him down to the cares of the work-day world alone, cheat life of half its glory.

The eighth of this month was the anniversary of the birth of the Virgin, and the celebration, if such it might be called, commenced the evening before, It is the custom, and Heaven only knows how it originated, for the people of the lower class to go through the streets in a company, blowing little penny whistles.  We were walking that night in the direction of the Duomo, when we met a band of these men, blowing with all their might on the shrill whistles, so that the whole neighborhood resounded with one continual, piercing, ear-splitting shriek.  They marched in a kind of quick trot through the streets, followed by a crowd of boys, and varying the noise occasionally by shouts and howls of the most horrible character.  They paraded through all the principal streets of the city, which for an hour sent up such an agonizing scream that you might have fancied it an enormous monster, expiring in great torment.  The people seemed to take the whole thing as a matter of course, but it was to us a novel manner of ushering in a religious festival.

The sky was clear and blue, as it always is in this Italian paradise, when we left Florence a few days ago for Fiesole.  In spite of many virtuous efforts to rise early, it was nine o’clock before we left the Porta San Gallo, with its triumphal arch to the Emperor Francis, striding the road to Bologna.  We passed through the public walk at this end of the city, and followed the road to Fiesole along the dried-up bed of a mountain torrent.  The dwellings of the Florentine nobility occupy the whole slope, surrounded with rich and lovely gardens.  The mountain and plain are both covered with luxuriant olive orchards, whose foliage of silver gray gives the scene the look of a moonlight landscape.