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.