Page:Poems Blagden.djvu/25

 her sweet verbenas, her roses, and against the walls her vines; imprisoning the sunshine in the long oval muscat-flavoured grapes, and loving to garner the huge bunches till some friend from England arrived to be cured of the vulgar notion that hothouse grapes are finer or more luscious than any grown in the open air between the Alps and the sea. How well I remember climbing a ladder, she the while steadying it—for it was monstrously rickety, as such things are apt to be in Italy—bringing down from the rafters of an outhouse the bunches she had stored so long, and helping her to bear them in triumph to some sceptical Britons. For nothing delighted her so much as hospitality, and she exercised it with a constant but ever unpretentious liberality. So large and comprehensive was her own humanity, that she would sometimes make the mistake of bringing fire and water together, and yet expecting them to fuse. Yet she herself possessed some secret charm, which enabled her to fuse equally well with either. She was a living disproof of Gay's aphorism, that a favourite has no friends. She was a universal favourite; and no firmer band of friends ever surrounded man or woman. Though she had all the gifts which we usually associate with a recluse, she was entirely without the moroseness or exclusiveness which often accompanies that character. She was remarkably fond of society, and there was not a house in Florence or its neighbourhood where she was not the most welcome of guests. I had the happiness of first making her acquaintance in a ball-room in that city,