The
plain little chamber of Michel Angelo seems still to expect his return;
his last sketches lie upon the table, his staff leans in the corner, and
his slippers wait before the empty chair. On one of the vine-clad hills,
just without the city walls, one's feet may press the same stairs that
Milton climbed to visit Galileo. To an American there is something
supremely impressive in this cumulative influence of the past full of
inspiration and rebuke, something saddening in this repeated proof that
moral supremacy is the only one that leaves monuments and not ruins
behind it. Time, who with us obliterates the labor and often the names of
yesterday, seems here to have spared almost the prints of the _care
piante_ that shunned the sordid paths of worldly honor.
Around the courtyard of the great Museum of Florence stand statues of her
illustrious dead, her poets, painters, sculptors, architects, inventors,
and statesmen; and as the traveller feels the ennobling lift of such
society, and reads the names or recognizes the features familiar to him
as his own threshold, he is startled to find Fame as commonplace here as
Notoriety everywhere else, and that this fifth-rate city should have the
privilege thus to commemorate so many famous men her sons, whose claim to
pre-eminence the whole world would concede.
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