But the very
inaccessible nature of the place made it a question of some difficulty
how the body should be transported in properly decorous fashion to the
railway station in the valley below--a difficulty which was solved by
the young scholars of the School of Forestry, who turned out in a body
to have the honour of bearing on their shoulders the remains of the
man whose writings had done so much to awaken the Government to the
necessity of establishing the institution to which they belonged.
Mrs. Marsh, for so many years the brightest ornament of the
Italo-American society, and equally admired and welcomed by the
English colony, first at Florence and then at Rome, still lives for
the equal delight of her friends on the other side of the Atlantic. I
may not, therefore, venture to say more of "what I remember" of her,
than that it abundantly accounts for the feeling of an unfilled void,
which her absence occasioned and occasions in both the American and
English world on the banks of the Tiber.
CHAPTER XV.
It was in the spring of the year 1860 that I first became acquainted
with "George Eliot" and G H. Lewes in Florence. But it was during
their second visit to Italy in 1861 that I saw a good deal more of
them. It was in that year, towards the end of May, that I succeeded
in persuading them to accompany me in a visit to the two celebrated
Tuscan monasteries of Camaldoli and La Vernia.
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