It was in September, ’73; I had much worldly business on hand for present
time, and much that was prospective. I was sixty-three years old, yet
in my prime; for I felt as if what Montaigne said was my case: every
man thinks he has twenty years more to live—and I have done it, so at
eighty-three, I have yet twenty before me! Yet, four days ago, December
4, ’91, was the third anni-_re_-versary of my broken leg, which will
imprison me (without hard labour, unless word-picking and hemp-picking
are one) for the term of my natural life!
Henry’s stay with me in Florence was short, but he went over the
galleries with me, and the walks, then returned to Germany, while I
settled myself down in pleasant rooms on the Lungarno Acciajoli (No. 18),
overlooking river, bridges, heights of Boboli, Bellosguardo, and St.
Miniato, my new and cheerful winter home, the air bright, the temperature
68° F., sun shining all day on my delightful windows.
What walks I thence took; often to the Boboli Gardens, whence falls on
the vision a superb view of the city with its various tints of brown and
white, so chaste, so compact, as to look like a massive cameo!
And I walked to all the old places, to Fiesole and back, the walk of many
hours, but enchanting all the way; now past the villa of Walter Savage
Landor, now the Villa Palmieri, the scene of the Decameron.
Then the walk over the Viale, then the walk along the sweet, soft Certosa
Road, the monastery now inhabited by a single monk, the caretaker of the
past. These walks and many others made Florence an ideal native land.
Then I settled down to my table to take stock of my work. I had, while at
Bath, received many reviews of my last volume, always favourable; and I
now contemplated a further adventure.
During a visit to Kelmscott, I wrote “Reminiscence,” a poem describing
the manor-house, the river, and surrounding scenery.
I took this to Florence with me, together with “Ecce Homo,” “The Exile,”
and “Ortrud’s Vision;” there I added others, “The Painter,” “Michael
Angelo,” and one or two besides, to my little store; and some I wrote on
my return to London, the next year, making in all a dozen poems, which
came out, not before 1876, as “New Symbols.”
My correspondence with Rossetti from Florence was constant; it was after
his reading “The Painter” that he offered a suggestion to me to write
“The Sculptor,” which I did, giving it the name of his idol, “Michael
Angelo.”
This poem I sent to Rossetti in manuscript, and he was pleased to return
me the following gracious reply, which I extract from a long letter.
“I read ‘The Sculptor,’ which may perhaps rank as the most masterly of
your poems; some passages (as stanza three) having absolutely a new and
valuable image in every couplet, and being as perfect in expression as
words can make them. I found the poem still further a gainer on being
submitted to the ordeal of _vivâ voce_ reading, on the occasion of
Brown’s being here lately, when the whole was encored and several stanzas
more than encored.”
I sketched out the “Birth of Venus” while in Italy; this time I had seen
that imaginary drama acted, in the waters of Nervi. In reply to a copy
I sent Rossetti of it, he remarked on two lines in the thirty-eighth
stanza, where the goddess sees herself reflected in the water. “It is an
idea so beautiful,” he said, “as to seldom occur to any poet during a
lifetime.” The lines are—
“Under her rose-dipped feet, the mirror shows
A form divine, enamelled in the sky.”
He wrote in exactly the same tone of a verse in “Michael Angelo,” the
four last lines of stanza three.
Should the reader trouble himself to run his mind over the early stanzas
he will recall the writer’s visit to Spezia, among the marble hills:
before then he had no conception of the mountains themselves being of
that precious stone; he had only pictured to himself the quarries whence
it was drawn.
Mr. William Rossetti, in a review in the _Academy_, of 1886, was so
complimentary as to call “Michael Angelo” “a sculptured poem.” The
introductory lines preceding stanza one greatly pleased Dante Rossetti.
I visited the monument of the Duke d’Urbino in the Capella dei Medici,
until I had well mastered Angelo’s greatest work, and interpreted and
translated it into metaphoric thought. I went to the opera to set my
thoughts to music, the language of verse.