Thinking these thoughts for the hundredth time, feeling them in a way as I feel the landscape, I walk home by the dear rock path girdling Fiesole, within sound of the chisels of the quarries. Blackthorn is now mixed in the bare purple hedgerows, and almond blossom, here and there, whitens the sere oak, and the black rocks above. These are the heights from which, as tradition has it, Florence descended, the people of which Dante said-- "Che discese da Fiesole ab antico, E tiene ancor del monte e del macigno," meaning it in anger. But it is true, and truer, in the good sense also. Mountain and rock! the art of Tuscany is sprung from it, from its arduous fruitfulness, with the clear stony stream, and the sparse gentle olive, and the cypress, unshaken by the wind, unscorched by the sun, and shooting inflexibly upwards. ART AND USEFULNESS. "Time was when everybody that made anything made a work of art besides a useful piece of goods, and it gave them pleasure to make it."--WILLIAM MORRIS, Address delivered at Burslem, 1881. I. Among the original capitals removed from the outer colonnade of the ducal palace at Venice there is a series devoted to the teaching of natural history, and another to that of such general facts about the races of man, his various moral attributes and activities, as the Venetians of the fourteenth century considered especially important. First, botany, illustrated by the fruits most commonly in use, piled up in baskets which constitute the funnel-shaped capital; each kind separate, with the name underneath in funny Venetian spelling: _Huva_, grapes; _Fici_, figs; _Moloni_, melons; _Zuche_, pumpkins; and _Persici_, peaches. Then, with Latin names, the various animals: _Ursus_, holding a honeycomb with bees on it; _Chanis_, mumbling only a large bone, while his cousins, wolf and fox, have secured a duck and a cock; _Aper_, the wild boar, munching a head of millet or similar grain.