created life with something of the ease and facility of a natural force; to have desired always Beauty as the only perfect flower of life; and while he was not content with the mere truth, and never with beauty divorced from life, he has created life in such abundance that his work may well be larger than the achievement of any two other men, even the greatest in painting; yet in his work, in the work that is really his, you will find nothing that is not living, nothing that is not an impassioned gesture reaching above and beyond our vision into the realm of that force which seems to be eternal.

FOOTNOTES: 

[127] Gronau, Titian (London, 1904), p. 291, where Dr. Gronau suggests it may belong to the following year; see also p. 104.

[128] Cf. Lettere di Pietro Aretino (1609), vol. iii. p. 238.

XXV.  TO FIESOLE AND SETTIGNANO

How weary one grows of the ways of a city,—­yes, even in Florence, where every street runs into the country and one may always see the hills and the sky!  But even in Athens, when they built the Parthenon, often, I think, I should have found my way into the olive gardens and vineyards about Kephisos:  so to-day, leaving the dead beauty littered in the churches, the palaces, the museums, the streets of Florence, very often I seek the living beauty of the country, the whisper of the poplars beside Arno, the little lovely songs of streams.  And then Florence is a city almost without suburbs;[129] at the gate you find the hills, the olive gardens bordered with iris, the vineyards hedged with the rose.

Many and fair are the ways to Fiesole:  you may go like a burgess in the tram, or like a lord in a coach, but for me I will go like a young man by the bye ways, like a poor man on my feet, and the dew will be yet on the roses when I set out, and in the vineyards they will be singing among the corn—­

    “Fiorin fiorello,
    La mi’ Rosina ha il labbro di corallo
    E l’occhiettino suo sembra un gioiello.”

And then, who knows what awaits one on the way?

    “E quando ti riscontro per la via
    Abbassi gli occhi e rassembri una dea,
    E la fai consumar la vita mia.”

Of the ways to Fiesole, one goes by Mugnone and one by S. Gervasio, but it will not be by them that I shall go, but out of Barriera delle Cure; and I shall pass behind the gardens of Villa Palmieri, whither after the second day of the Decamerone Boccaccio’s fair ladies and gay lords passed from Poggio Gherardo by a little path “but little used, which was covered with herbs and flowers, that opened under the rising sun, while they listened to the song of the nightingales and other birds.”  Thus between the garden walls I shall come to S. Domenico.