Chapter XIII

Thinking these thoughts for the hundredth time, feeling them in a way as I feel the landscape, I walk home by the dear rock path girdling Fiesole, within sound of the chisels of the quarries. Blackthorn is now mixed in the bare purple hedgerows, and almond blossom, here and there, whitens the sere oak, and the black rocks above. These are the heights from which, as tradition has it, Florence descended, the people of which Dante said--

"Che discese da Fiesole ab antico,
E tiene ancor del monte e del macigno,"

meaning it in anger. But it is true, and truer, in the good sense also. Mountain and rock! the art of Tuscany is sprung from it, from its arduous fruitfulness, with the clear stony stream, and the sparse gentle olive, and the cypress, unshaken by the wind, unscorched by the sun, and shooting inflexibly upwards.

ART AND USEFULNESS.

"Time was when everybody that made anything made a work of art
besides a useful piece of goods, and it gave them pleasure to
make it."--WILLIAM MORRIS, Address delivered at Burslem, 1881.