As spring returned, they went northward through Lombardy and the Brenner
once more on their way to Munich. Her own Tyrol looked more beautiful
than ever as they passed, with its unmelted snows lying thick on the
mountains. But, save for a night at Innsbruck, they might not stop
there. Yet, even after that short lapse of time in southern cities, oh,
how different, how altered little Innsbruck seemed to her! She had
thought it before such a grand big town; she thought it now so much
shrunken, so old-world, so quaint, so homely. And then, no Will Deverill
was there, as before, to brighten it. The mountains gazed down as of old
from their precipitous crags upon the nestling town; they were Tyrolese
and home-like; and therefore she loved them. But everything had a
smaller and meaner air than six months earlier; the queer old High
Street was just odd, not magnificent; the Anna Säule was dwarfed, the
Rathhaus had grown smaller. She had only seen Milan, Florence, Rome,
meanwhile; but Milan, Florence, Rome, made Innsbruck sink at once to its
proper place as a mere provincial capital. While they waited for the
Munich train next morning, she strolled into the Hofkirche, to see once
more Maximilian’s tomb with its attendant figures. She started at the
sight. After the Venus and the Laocoon it surprised her to think she
could so lately have stood awestruck before those naïf bronze abortions!
That summer they spent in Germany, almost wholly at Munich. There Linnet
went through a course of musical training under a well-known teacher,
and there, too, she had ample opportunities, at the same time, of
cultivating to the full her general artistic faculties. Next winter,
back to Italy—this time to Venice, Rome, and Naples. Linnet learnt much
once more; it was all so glorious; the Grand Canal, St Mark’s, the
Academy, the Frari, Sorrento, Capri, Pozzuoli, the great operas at San
Carlo. So she stored her brain all the time with fresh experiences of
men, women, and things; with pictures of places, of architecture, of
sculpture, of scenery. Everywhere her quick mind assimilated at once all
that was best and most valuable in what she saw or listened to; by eye
and by ear alike, she was half-unconsciously educating herself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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