The Hills of Arcetri (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from The Hills of ArcetriTo drop the metaphor (with regret, so completely does Italy demand the phrase ology of the goddess) and descend to simple fact and simple truth, it seems to me that our ardour and our admiration for the features of her country, the stories of her history andthe products of her arts have tended in a certain sense to blur our real knowledge of her. I trust that the statement does not sound too bold merely it resolves itself into the fact that, if her supreme contribution to the world is and has been aesthetic, one battle scene of Paolo Uccello's is in its significance vastly superior to the dates and data of fifty sieges. It is in a glorious ¿ash an epoch, the quintessence, the fine ¿avour of it, and if you could call each one of the figures in that struggling crowd by name and give his dates of birth and death it would not make the Whole by the shadow of one heart-beat more real. It is not that the details in themselves lack interest, (indeed one could hardly say that in all the maddening and magnificent mass of detail in Italy one single item lacks interest, ) it is that we are obsessed by them, blinded by them. We see not the tapestry but the stitches, delicate, precise and fine, not the picture but the brush - strokes, smooth, deft and accurate we are weary and stumbling yet eager. The waves beat us to and fro in the sea of her splendour.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.