The walls are never less than five feet thick, and sometimes
more, so that it is perfectly cool. I should feel very happy to live
here always. I am sitting in the loggia, which is delightful in the
morning freshness. Oh, how I love every inch of that beautiful
landscape!" The tower and the adjacent loggia were the features that
preeminently sated our thirst for suggestive charm, and they became
our proud boast and the chief precincts of our daily life and social
intercourse. The ragged gray giant looked over the road-walls at its
foot, and beyond and below them over the Arno valley, rimmed atop with
azure distance, and touched with the delicate dark of trees.
Internally, the tower (crowned, like a rough old king of the days of
the Round Table, with a machicolated summit) was dusty, broken, and
somewhat dangerous of ascent. Owls that knew every wrinkle of despair
and hoot-toot of pessimism clung to narrow crevices in the deserted
rooms, where the skeleton-like prison frameworks at the unglazed
windows were in keeping with the dreadful spirits of these
unregenerate anchorites. The forlorn apartments were piled one above
the other until the historic cylinder of stone opened to the sky. In
contrast to the barrenness of the gray inclosures, through the squares
of the windows throbbed the blue and gold, green and lilac, of Italian
heavens and countryside.
At the dangers of the stairway my father laughed, with flashing
glances. He always laughed (it was a sound peculiarly passionate and
low, full, yet unobtrusive) at dangers in which he could share
himself, although so grave when, in the moral turmoil, he was obliged
to stand and watch uneven battle; not the less sorry for human nature
because weakness comes from our ignoring the weapons we might have
used.
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