also of arranging for the night’s lodging of a female is much greater at La Vernia.  There is indeed a very fairly comfortable house, kept under the management of two sisters of the order of Saint Francis, expressly for the purpose of lodging lady pilgrims to the shrine.  For in former days—­scarcely now, I think—­the wives of the Florentine aristocracy used to undertake a pilgrimage to La Vernia as a work of devotion.  But this house is at the bottom of the long ascent—­nearly an hour’s severe climb from the convent—­an arrangement which necessarily involves much additional fatigue to a lady visitor.

George Eliot writes to Miss Sara Hennell on the 19th of June, a letter inserted by Mr. Cross in his admirable biography of his wife—­“I wish you could have shared the pleasures of our last expedition from Florence to the monasteries of Camaldoli and La Vernia.  I think it was just the sort of thing you would have entered into with thorough zest.”  And she goes on to speak of La Vernia in a manner which seems to show that it was the latter establishment which most keenly interested and impressed her.  She was in fact under the spell of the great and still potent personality of Saint Francis, which informs with his memory every detail of the buildings and rocks around you.  Each legend was full of interest for her.  The alembic of her mind seemed to have the secret of distilling from traditions, which in their grossness the ordinary visitor turns from with a smile of contempt, the spiritual value they once possessed for ages of faith, or at least the poetry with which the simple belief of those ages has invested them.  Nobody could be more alive to every aspect of natural beauty than she showed herself during the whole of this memorable excursion.  But at La Vernia the human interest over-rode the simply aesthetic one.

Her day was a most fatiguing one.  And when Lewes and I wearily climbed the hill on foot, after escorting her to her sleeping quarters, he was not a little anxious lest on the morrow she should find herself unable for the ride which was to take us to the spot where a carriage was available for our return to Florence.

But it was not so.  She slept well under the care of the Franciscan nuns, who managed to get her a cup of milkless coffee in the morning, and so save her from the necessity of again climbing the hill.  A charming drive through the Casentino, or valley of the Upper Arno, showing us the aspect of a Tuscan valley very different from that of the Lower Arno, brought to an end an expedition which has always remained in my memory as one of the most delightful of my life.

I had much talk with George Eliot during the time—­very short at Florence—­when she was maturing her Italian novel, Romola.  Of course, I knew that she was digesting the acquisitions of each day with a view to writing; but I had not the slightest idea of the period to which her inquiries were specially directed, or of the nature of the work intended.  But when I read Romola, I was struck by the wonderful power of absorption manifested in every page of it.  The rapidity with which she squeezed out the essence and significance of a most complex period of history, and assimilated the net results of its many-sided phases, was truly marvellous.