Here I stand, and watch the Arno rolling its sullen waves. In Pisa, at
such an hour, the Arno is the emblem of Despair. Swollen with melted
snow from the mountains, it has gnawed its miserable clay banks and now
creeps along, leaden and inert, half solid, like a torrent of liquid
mud--irresolute whether to be earth or water; whether to stagnate here
for ever at my feet, or crawl onward yet another sluggish league into
the sea. So may Lethe look, or Styx: the nightmare of a flood.
There is dreary monotony in all Italian rivers, once they have reached
the plain. They are livelier in their upper reaches. At Florence--where
those citron-tinted houses are mirrored in the stream--you may study the
Arno in all its ever-changing moods. Seldom is its colour quite the
same. The hue of cafe-au-lait in full spate, it shifts at other times
between apple-green and jade, between celadon and chrysolite and
eau-de-Nil. In the weariness of summer the tints are prone to fade
altogether out of the waves. They grow bleached, devitalized; they are
spent, withering away like grass that has lain in the sun. [4] Yet with
every thunder-storm on yonder hills the colour-sprite leaps back into
the waters.
Your Florentine of the humbler sort loves to dawdle along the bank on a
bright afternoon, watching the play of the river and drawing a kind of
philosophic contentment out of its cool aquatic humours. Presently he
reaches that bridge--the jewellers' bridge. He thinks he must buy a
ring.
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