sun, that lovely, green, cool forest full of silver shadows, with every here and there a little farm for the pine cones, about which they are heaped in great banks.  Coming out of this wood on the dusty road in the golden heat, between fields of cucumbers, you meet market carts and contadini returning from the city.  Then you cross the Serchio in the early light, still and mysterious as a river out of Malory.  And at last, suddenly, like a mirage, the towers of Pisa rise before you, faint and beautiful as in a dream.  As you turn to look behind you at the world you are leaving, you find that the mountains, those marvellous Apuan Alps with their fragile peaks, have been lost in the distance and the sky; and so, with half a regret, full of expectancy and excitement nevertheless, you quicken your pace, and even in the heat set out quickly for the white city before you,—­Pisa, once lord of the sea, the first great city of Tuscany.

FOOTNOTES: 

[15] I no longer believe it is possible to be certain of the place.  At any rate, all the guide-books, Baedeker, Murray, and Hare, are wrong, though not so far out as that gentleman who, having assured us that Boccaccio was a “little priest,” and that Petrarch, Poliziano, Lorenzo, and Pulci were of no account as poets, remarks that Shelley’s body was found at Lerici, and that he was burned close by.

[16] See Carmichael, The Old Road, etc., pp. 183-202.

VI.  PISA

I

To enter Pisa by the Porta Nuova, coming at once into the Piazza del Duomo, is as though at midday, on the highway, one had turned aside into a secret meadow full of a strange silence and dazzling light, where have been abandoned among the wild flowers the statues of the gods.  For the Piazza is just that—­a meadow scattered with daisies, among which, as though forgotten, stand unbroken a Cathedral, a Baptistery, a Tower, and a Cemetery, all of marble, separate and yet one in the consummate beauty of their grouping.  And as though weary of the silence and the light, the tower has leaned towards the flowers, which may fade and pass away.  So amid the desolation of the Acropolis must the statues of the Parthenon have looked from the hills and the sea, with something of this abandoned splendour, this dazzling solitude, this mysterious calm silence, satisfied and serene.

Wherever you may be in Pisa, you cannot escape from the mysterious influence of those marvellous ghosts that haunt the verge of the city, that corner apart where the wind is white on the grass, and the shadows steal slowly through the day.  The life of the world is far away on the other side of the city; here is only beauty and peace.