562 PRÆTERITA-III

the same arches where Dante saw it. We drank of it together, and walked together that evening on the hills above, where the fireflies among the scented thickets shone fitfully in the still undarkened air.¹ How they shone! moving like fine-broken starlight through the purple leaves. How they shone! through the sunset that faded into thunderous night as I entered Siena three days before, the white edges of the mountainous clouds still lighted from the west, and the openly golden sky calm behind the Gate of Siena’s heart, with its still golden words, “Cor magis tibi Sena pandit,”² and the fireflies everywhere in sky and cloud rising and falling, mixed with the lightning, and more intense than the stars.

BRANTWOOD,

June 19th, 1889.

not counting Lady Trevelyan or little Connie,³ (all together five opponent powers)-may be held practically answerable for my having never followed up the historic study begun in Val d’Arno, for it chanced that, alike in Florence, Siena, and Rome, all these friends, tutors, or enchantresses were at different times amusing themselves when I was at my hardest work; and many happy days were spent by all of us in somewhat luxurious hotel life, when by rights I should have been still under Padre Tino in the sacristy of Assisi,⁴ or Cardinal Agostini at Venice, or the Pope himself at Rome, with my much older friend than any of these, Mr. Rawdon Brown’s perfectly faithful and loving servant Antonio. Of Joanna’s and Connie’s care of me some further history will certainly, if I live, be given in No. VII., “The Rainbows of Giessbach”;⁵ of Charles Norton’s visit to me there also.

¹ [Ruskin refers again to the fireflies, seen at Siena in 1870, in a note added at the end of Ethics of the Dust in 1877: see Vol. XVIII. p. 368. A passage from an earlier letter (to his father) may be added:-

“PISTOJA, May 28, 1845.-I have just come in from an evening walk among the stars and fireflies. One hardly knows where one has got to between them, for the flies flash, as you know, exactly like stars on the sea, and the impression to the eye is as if one was walking on water. I was not the least prepared for their intense brilliancy. They dazzled me like fireworks, and it was very heavenly to see them floating, field beyond field, under the shadowy vines.”]

² [For this inscription, see Vol. XXIII. p. 27.]

³ [For Miss Constance Hilliard (Mrs. W. H. Churchill), see above, p. 458.]

⁴ [See Vol. XXIX. p. 90 (where he is called “Tini”), and compare Vol. XXIII. p. xxxix. For Cardinal Agostini, see Vol. XXXII. p. 126; and for Antonio, Vol. XXIV. pp. xxxix.-xliii., and Vol. XXIX. p. 68.]

⁵ [For another reference to this unwritten chapter, see below, p. 633.]

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