Letter XXX

Dearest: I cannot say I have seen Pisa, for the majority had
their way, and we simply skipped into it, got ourselves bumped down at
the Duomo and Campo Santo for two hours, fell exhausted to bed, and
skipped out again by the first train next morning. Over the walls of the
Campo Santo are some divine crumbs of Benozzo Gozzoli (don't expect me
ever to spell the names of dead painters correctly: it is a politeness
one owes to the living, but the famous dead are exalted by being spelt
phonetically as the heart dictates, and become all the better company
for that greatest of unspelled and spread-about names--Shakspere,
Shakspeare, Shakespeare--his mark, not himself). Such a long parenthesis
requires stepping-stones to carry you over it: "crumbs" was the last
(wasn't a whole loaf of bread a stepping-stone in one of Andersen's
fairy-tales?): but, indeed, I hadn't time to digest them properly. Let
me come back to them before I die, and bury me in that inclosure if you
love me as much then as I think you do now.

The Baptistry has a roof of echoes that is wonderful,--a mirror of sound
hung over the head of an official who opens his mouth for centimes to
drop there. You sing notes up into it (or rather you don't, for that is
his perquisite), and they fly circling, and flock, and become a single
chord stretching two octaves: till you feel that you are living inside
what in the days of our youth would have been called "the sound of a
grand Amen."