Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete

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Hawthorne Nathaniel. Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete

VOL. I

PASSAGES FROM HAWTHORNE'S NOTE-BOOKS IN FRANCE AND ITALY

FRANCE

MARSEILLES

THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA

ROME

JOURNEY TO FLORENCE

TO TERNI. – BORGHETTO

FOLIGNO

PERUGIA

PASSIGNANO

AREZZO

INCISA

TO FLORENCE

VOL. II

PASSAGES FROM HAWTHORNE'S NOTE-BOOKS IN FRANCE AND ITALY

FLORENCE (Continued)

VILLA MONTANTO. MONTE BENI

SIENA

RADICOFANI

VITERBO

SETTE VENE

ROME

FRANCE

AVIGNON

GENEVA

VILLENEUVE

HAVRE

ENGLAND

LONDON

Отрывок из книги

Hotel de Louvre, January 6th, 1858. – On Tuesday morning, our dozen trunks and half-dozen carpet-bags being already packed and labelled, we began to prepare for our journey two or three hours before light. Two cabs were at the door by half past six, and at seven we set out for the London Bridge station, while it was still dark and bitterly cold. There were already many people in the streets, growing more numerous as we drove city-ward; and, in Newgate Street, there was such a number of market-carts, that we almost came to a dead lock with some of them. At the station we found several persons who were apparently going in the same train with us, sitting round the fire of the waiting-room. Since I came to England there has hardly been a morning when I should have less willingly bestirred myself before daylight; so sharp and inclement was the atmosphere. We started at half past eight, having taken through tickets to Paris by way of Folkestone and Boulogne. A foot-warmer (a long, flat tin utensil, full of hot water) was put into the carriage just before we started; but it did not make us more than half comfortable, and the frost soon began to cloud the windows, and shut out the prospect, so that we could only glance at the green fields – immortally green, whatever winter can do against them – and at, here and there, a stream or pool with the ice forming on its borders. It was the first cold weather of a very mild season. The snow began to fall in scattered and almost invisible flakes; and it seemed as if we had stayed our English welcome out, and were to find nothing genial and hospitable there any more.

At Folkestone, we were deposited at a railway station close upon a shingly beach, on which the sea broke in foam, and which J – reported as strewn with shells and star-fish; behind was the town, with an old church in the midst; and, close, at hand, the pier, where lay the steamer in which we were to embark. But the air was so wintry, that I had no heart to explore the town, or pick up shells with J – on the beach; so we kept within doors during the two hours of our stay, now and then looking out of the windows at a fishing-boat or two, as they pitched and rolled with an ugly and irregular motion, such as the British Channel generally communicates to the craft that navigate it.

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On the staircase ascending to their piano we saw the ancient Greek bas-relief of a lion, whence Canova is supposed to have taken the idea of his lions on the monument in St. Peter's. Afterwards we made two or three calls in the neighborhood of the Piazza de' Spagna, finding only Mr. Hamilton Fish and family, at the Hotel d'Europe, at home, and next visited the studio of Mr. C. G. Thompson, whom I knew in Boston. He has very greatly improved since those days, and, being always a man of delicate mind, and earnestly desiring excellence for its own sake, he has won himself the power of doing beautiful and elevated works. He is now meditating a series of pictures from Shakespeare's "Tempest," the sketches of one or two of which he showed us, likewise a copy of a small Madonna, by Raphael, wrought with a minute faithfulness which it makes one a better man to observe… Mr. Thompson is a true artist, and whatever his pictures have of beauty comes from very far beneath the surface; and this, I suppose, is one weighty reason why he has but moderate success. I should like his pictures for the mere color, even if they represented nothing. His studio is in the Via Sistina; and at a little distance on the other side of the same street is William Story's, where we likewise went, and found him at work on a sitting statue of Cleopatra.

The statue of his father, his first work, is very noble, as noble and fine a portrait-statue as I ever saw. In the outer room of his studio a stone-cutter, or whatever this kind of artisan is called, was at work, transferring the statue of Hero from the plaster-cast into marble; and already, though still in some respects a block of stone, there was a wonderful degree of expression in the face. It is not quite pleasant to think that the sculptor does not really do the whole labor on his statues, but that they are all but finished to his hand by merely mechanical people. It is generally only the finishing touches that are given by his own chisel.

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