Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/675



its two bushes of pampas-grass, like two lamps burning with white flame, before it, speak of Theodoric the Goth as of a king against whom Garibaldi might have led them.

One still sees, in the mosaic of the choir of S. Vitale, the insatiable eyes of the Empress Theodora, as she stands, tall and royally draped, and crowned with pearls, offering a cup of gold to the throned Christ. In the church of S. Maria in Porto Fuori, which rises with its great square tower out of a farmyard in a field, one still sees, among the half-ruined frescos with their colors of pale rose, the calm and eager face of Francesca da Rimini: the bright gold hair wreathed with green leaves, the long neck, the long sensitive hands, the long straight line of nose and forehead, and the wide-open eye, looking down from an open window, as if for the first sight of Paolo. The cottage woman who opened the church door for me spoke with an easy, smiling, and respectful familiarity of Francesca and of Peter the Sinner, the Blessed Pietro degli Onesti who built the church in