Limbo, and Other Essays |
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Alps architecture Asolo beauty Bernini blue Cæsar century charm church colour COVENT GARDEN creatures cypresses dear delightful distant dull emotion empty eyes fancy feel Florence flowers fruit genius Giorgione grass green Grenada grey grow hedges Hermitage hills hillside historic habit hurried Hypnerotomachia Poliphili ilexes Italian garden Italy Jerome John Evelyn ladies land landscape Lecceto Leisure lichen light lilies Limbo little Princess living look magnificent means mediæval merely MIDSUMMER MAGIC modern moon mountains mysterious natural objects ness never night old houses one's ourselves paint painters palaces pale past perhaps persons picture pines pleasure poet poetry poplar rows Praxiteles Rabbits rapture Rheinfelden road Roman Roman villas Rome rose round sculpture seemed seen sense soul steep things thoughts Titian town travelling trees turning Tuscan undulating vague valley Venice Villa walk wall wonderful woods word
Popular passages
Page 130 - Votre âme est un paysage choisi Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques. Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur L'amour vainqueur et la vie opportune, Ils n'ont pas l'air de croire à leur bonheur Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune.
Page 31 - ... so does this historic habit mean supplementing our present life by a life in the past ; a life larger, richer than our own, multiplying our emotions by those of the dead. ... I am no longer speaking of our passions for Joan of Arc and Marie Antoinette, which disappear with our childhood ; I am speaking of a peculiar sense, ineffable, indescribable, but which...
Page 119 - ... sleep, while the cicalas buzzed at noon; some cypresses gathered together into a screen, just to separate the garden from the olive yard above ; gradually perhaps a balustrade set at the end of the bowling-green, that you might see, even from a distance, the shimmery blue valley below — the pale blue distant hills; and if you had it, some antique statue, not good enough for the courtyard of the town house, set on the balustrade or against the tree ; also, where water was plentiful, a little...
Page 124 - ... the old sculpture being thus in a way assimilated through the operation of earth, wind, and rain, into tree-trunks and mossy boulders, a new sculpture arises undertaking to make of marble something which will continue the impression of the trees and waters, wave its jagged outlines like the branches, twist its supple limbs like the fountains. It is high time that some one should stop the laughing and sniffing at this great sculpture of Bernini and his Italian and French followers, the last spontaneous...
Page 114 - It is a piece of terraced ground along which the water — spurted from the dolphin's mouth or the siren's breasts — runs through walled channels, refreshing impartially violets and salads, lilies and tall flowering onions, under the branches of the peach tree and the pomegranate, to where, in the shade of the great pink oleander tufts, it pours out below into the big tank, for the maids to rinse their linen in the evening, and the peasants to fill their cans to water the bedded-out tomatoes, and...
Page 131 - And since I have mentioned gates, I must not forget one other sort of old Italian garden, perhaps the most poetical and pathetic — the garden that has ceased to exist. You meet it along every Italian highroad or country lane; a piece of field, tender green with the short wheat in winter, brown and orange with the dried maize husks and seeding sorghum in summer, the wide grass path still telling of coaches that once rolled in ; a big stone bench, with sweeping shell-like back under the rosemary...
Page 30 - I insisted on having a copy made, and sticking it up in my room . . It does but little honour to our greatest living philosopher that he, whom children will bless for free permission to bruise, burn, and cut their bodies, and empty the sugarbowl and jam-pot, should wish to deprive the coming generation of all historical knowledge, of so much joy therefore, and, let me add, of so much education. For do not tell me that it is not education, and of the best, to enable a child to feel the passion and...
Page 113 - A friend of mine has painted a picture of another of Boccaccio's ladies, Madonna Dianora, visiting the garden, which (to the confusion of her virtuous stratagem) the enamoured Ansaldo has made to bloom in January by magic arts : a little picture full of the quaint lovely details of Dello's wedding chests, the charm of the roses and lilies, the plashing fountains and birds singing against a background of wintry trees and snowshrouded fields, the dainty youths and damsels treading their way among the...