Then Rome—the Vatican, the Colosseum, the monuments, St Peter’s, the loud organs, the singing boys, the incense, the purple robes and mitres, the great guttering candles! All that could awake in unison every chord of religion and its sister art, in that simple religious artistic nature, was there to gratify her! It was glorious! it was wonderful! So her winter passed away, her first winter with Andreas; she was learning fast, both with eye and with ear, all that Italy and its masters could possibly teach her.
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.