Siena and Perugia rose, obedient to engineers' art, two perennial fountains. Without engineers' art, the glens which cleave the sand-rock of Siena flow with living water; and still, if there be a hell for the forger in Italy, he remembers therein the sweet grotto and green wave of Fonte Branda. But on the very summit of the two hills, crested by their great civic fortresses, and in the centres of their circuit of walls, rose the two guided wells; each in basin of goodly marble, sculptured—at Perugia, by John of Pisa, at Siena, by James of Quercia.
39. It is one of the bitterest regrets of my life, (and I have many which .some men would Hnd difficult to bear,) that I never saw, except when I was a youth, and then with sealed eyes, Jacopo della Ouercia's fountain.[1] The Sienese, a little while since, tore it down, and put up a model of it by a modern carver. In like manner, perhaps, you will some day knock the Elgin marbles to pieces, and commission an Academician to put up new ones,—the Sienese doing
- ↑ I observe that Charles Dickens had the fortune denied to me. "The market-place, or great Piazza, is a large square, with a great broken-nosed fountain in it." ("Pictures from Italy.")
