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Page 30
"He came to Florence long ago
And painted here these walls, that shone
For Raphael and for Angelo,
With secrets deeper than his own,
Then shrank into the dark again,
And died, we know not how or when.
"The darkness deepened, and I turned
Half sadly from the fresco grand;
'And is this,' mused I, 'all ye earned,
High-vaulted brain and cunning hand,
That ye to other men could teach
The skill yourselves could never reach?'
* * * * *
"Henceforth, when rings the health to those
Who live in story and in song,
O, nameless dead, that now repose
Safe in oblivion's chambers strong,
One cup of recognition true
Shall silently be drained to you!"
"But Masaccio does not need any other monument than this chapel. He is
not very badly off, I am sure, while this stands, and people come from
all over the world to visit it," exclaimed Malcom, as they left the
Brancacci Chapel, and walked slowly down the nave of the church.
"Is this all he painted?" asked Barbara.
"There is one other fresco in the cloister of this same church, but it
is sadly injured--indeed half obliterated," answered Mr. Sumner. "That
is all. But his influence cannot be estimated. What he, then a poor,
unknown young man, working his very best upon these walls, accomplished
for the great world of painting can never be measured. He surely wrought
'better than he knew.' This was because he, for the first time in the
history of modern painting, portrayed real life. All the
conventionalities that had hitherto clung, in a greater or less degree,
to painting, were dropped by him; and thus the way was opened for the
perfect representations of the High Renaissance which so soon followed.
We will next give some time to the study of the works of Ghirlandajo and
Botticelli, who, with Filippino Lippi, who finished these frescoes which
we have just been looking at, make a famous trio of Early Renaissance
painters."
After they had crossed Ponte alla Carraja, Margery said she wished to do
some shopping on Via dei Fossi, which was close at hand--that street
whose shop windows are ever filled with most fascinating groups of
sculptured marbles and bronzes, and all kinds of artistic
bric-a-brac--and begged her uncle to accompany her.
"I wish no one else to come," she said, with her own little, emphatic
nod.
"Oh, ho! secrets!" exclaimed Malcom; "so we must turn aside!"
"Do go to drive with me," begged Howard. "Here we are close to my hotel,
and I can have the team ready right off."
So they walked a few steps along the Lung' Arno to the pleasant, sunny
Hotel de la Grande Bretagne, which Howard had chosen for his Florentine
home, and soon recrossed the Arno, and swept out through Porta Romana
into the open country, behind Howard's beautiful gray horses.
The crisp, cool air brought roses into Barbara's and Bettina's cheeks,
and ruffled their pretty brown hair. Malcom was in high spirits after
his long confinement to the house, and Howard tried to throw off a
gloomy, discouraged feeling that had hung over him all the morning.
Seated opposite Barbara, and continually meeting her frank, steadfast
eyes, he seemed to realize as he had never before done the obvious truth
of Mrs. Douglas's words, when she had said that Barbara was perfectly
unconscious of his love for her; and all the manhood within him strove
to assert itself to resist an untimely discovery of his feeling, for
fear of the mischief it might cause.
Howard had been doing a great deal of new thinking during the past
weeks. He suddenly found himself surrounded by an atmosphere wholly
different from that in which he had before lived.
Sprung from an aristocratic and thoroughly egoistic ancestry on his
father's side, and a morbidly sensitive one on his mother's; brought up
by his paternal grandmother, whose every thought had been centred upon
him as the only living descendant of her family; surrounded by servants
who were the slaves of his grandmother's and his own whims; not even his
experience in the Boston Latin School, chosen because his father,
grandfather, and great-grandfather had been educated there, had served
to widen much the horizon of his daily living, or to make him anything
like a typical American youth.
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