Among My Books, Second Series

Among My Books, Second Series

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Title: Among My Books
Author: James Russell Lowell
Release Date: July, 2005 [EBook #8509] [This file was first posted on
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Language: English

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AMONG MY BOOKS
Second Series
by JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

To R.W. EMERSON.
A love and honor which more than thirty years have deepened, though
priceless to him they enrich, are of little import to one capable of
inspiring them. Yet I cannot deny myself the pleasure of so far
intruding on your reserve as at least to make public acknowledgment of
the debt I can never repay.

CONTENTS.
DANTE
SPENSER
WORDSWORTH
MILTON
KEATS

DANTE.[1]
On the banks of a little river so shrunken by the suns of summer that it
seems fast passing into a tradition, but swollen by the autumnal rains
with an Italian suddenness of passion till the massy bridge shudders
under the impatient heap of waters behind it, stands a city which, in its
period of bloom not so large as Boston, may well rank next to Athens
in the history which teaches _come l' uom s' eterna_.
Originally only a convenient spot in the valley where the fairs of the
neighboring Etruscan city of Fiesole were held, it gradually grew from

a huddle of booths to a town, and then to a city, which absorbed its
ancestral neighbor and became a cradle for the arts, the letters, the
science, and the commerce[2] of modern Europe. For her Cimabue
wrought, who infused Byzantine formalism with a suggestion of nature
and feeling; for her the Pisani, who divined at least, if they could not
conjure with it, the secret of Greek supremacy in sculpture; for her the
marvellous boy Ghiberti proved that unity of composition and grace of
figure and drapery were never beyond the reach of genius;[3] for her
Brunelleschi curved the dome which Michel Angelo hung in air on St.
Peter's; for her Giotto reared the bell-tower graceful as an Horatian ode
in marble; and the great triumvirate of Italian poetry, good sense, and
culture called her mother. There is no modern city about which cluster
so many elevating associations, none in which the past is so
contemporary with us in unchanged buildings and undisturbed
monuments. The house of Dante is still shown; children still receive
baptism at the font (_il mio bel San Giovanni_) where he was
christened before the acorn dropped that was to grow into a keel for
Columbus; and an inscribed stone marks the spot where he used to sit
and watch the slow blocks swing up to complete the master-thought of
Arnolfo. In the convent of St. Mark hard by lived and labored Beato
Angelico, the saint of Christian art, and Fra Bartolommeo, who taught
Raphael dignity. From the same walls Savonarola went forth to his
triumphs, short-lived almost as the crackle of his martyrdom. The plain
little chamber of Michel Angelo seems still to expect his return; his last
sketches lie upon the table, his staff leans in the corner, and his slippers
wait before the empty chair. On one of the vine-clad hills, just without
the city walls, one's feet may press the same stairs that Milton climbed
to visit Galileo. To an American there is something supremely
impressive in this cumulative influence of the past full of inspiration
and rebuke, something saddening in this repeated proof that moral
supremacy is the only one that leaves monuments and not ruins behind
it. Time, who with us obliterates the labor and often the names of
yesterday, seems here to have spared almost the prints of the care
piante that shunned the sordid paths of worldly honor.
Around the courtyard of the