Such a long parenthesis
requires stepping-stones to carry you over it: "crumbs" was the last
(wasn't a whole loaf of bread a stepping-stone in one of Andersen's
fairy-tales?): but, indeed, I hadn't time to digest them properly. Let
me come back to them before I die, and bury me in that inclosure if you
love me as much then as I think you do now.
The Baptistry has a roof of echoes that is wonderful,--a mirror of sound
hung over the head of an official who opens his mouth for centimes to
drop there. You sing notes up into it (or rather you don't, for that is
his perquisite), and they fly circling, and flock, and become a single
chord stretching two octaves: till you feel that you are living inside
what in the days of our youth would have been called "the sound of a
grand Amen."
The cathedral has fine points, or more than points--aspects: but the
Italian version of Gothic, with its bands of flat marbles instead of
moldings, was a shock to me at first. I only begin to understand it now
that I have seen the outside of the Duomo at Florence. Curiously enough,
it doesn't strike me as in the least Christian, only civic and splendid,
reminding me of what Ruskin says about church architecture being really
a dependant on the feudal or domestic. The Strozzi Palace is a beautiful
piece of street-architecture; its effect is of an iron hand which gives
you a buffet in the face when you look up and wonder--how shall I climb
in? I will tell you more about insides when I write next.
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