Beyond are the Cascine Gardens, stretching for some two miles between the Arno and the Mugnone, delicious to linger in, and a sacred place to all lovers of English poetry. For here, towards the close of 1819, "in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains," Shelley wrote the divinest of all English lyrics: the _Ode to the West Wind_. "Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawakened earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O, wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" [Illustration: IN THE BOBOLI GARDENS] CHAPTER XII _Across the Arno_ "Come a man destra, per salire al monte, dove siede la Chiesa che soggioga la ben guidata sopra Rubaconte, si rompe del montar l'ardita foga. per le scalee che si fero ad etade ch'era sicuro il quaderno e la doga." --_Dante._ Across the river, partly lying along its bank and partly climbing up St. George's hill to the south, lies what was the Sesto d'Oltrarno in the days when old Florence was divided into sextaries, and became the Quartiere di Santo Spirito when the city was reorganised in quarters after the expulsion of the Duke of Athens. It was not originally a part of the city itself. At the time of building the second walls in the twelfth century (_see_ chapter i.), there were merely three _borghi_ or suburbs beyond the Arno, inhabited by the poorest classes, each of the three beginning at the head of the Ponte Vecchio; the Borgo Pidiglioso to the east, towards the present Via dei Bardi and Santa Lucia, where the road went on to Rome by way of Figline and Arezzo; the Borgo di Santa Felicità, to the south, ending in a gate at the present Piazza San Felice, where the road to Siena commenced; and the Borgo San Jacopo to the west, with a gate in the present Piazza Frescobaldi, on the way to Pisa. A few rich and noble families began to settle here towards the beginning of the thirteenth century. When the dissensions between Guelfs and Ghibellines came to a head in 1215, the Nerli and Rossi were Guelfs, the Gangalandi, Ubbriachi and Mannelli, Ghibellines; and these were then the only nobles of the Oltrarno, although Villani tells us that "the Frescobaldi and the Bardi and the Mozzi were already beginning to become powerful." The _Primo Popolo_ commenced to wall it in, in 1250, with the stones from