So Linnet went her way, undeterred by her husband, and educated herself in general culture at the same time that she received her strict musical training. She knew Raphael’s Sposalizio as intimately after a while as she knew her own _châlet_; she gazed on the flowing lines of Luini’s frescoes till they grew familiar to her eyes as the Stations of the Cross in the old church at St Valentin. She drank in the cathedral with an endless joy; she loved its innumerable pinnacles, its thousand statues in the marble niches: she admired the gloomy antiquity of mouldering Sant’ Ambrogio, the dim religious aisles of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Amid surroundings like these, her artistic nature expanded by degrees as naturally as a bud opens out into a flower before the summer sunshine. She revelled in the architecture, the pictures, the statuary: Milan stood to the soul of the peasant-singer as a veritable university.
It was the first time, too, that Linnet had ever found herself in a bustling, business-like, modern city. The hurry and scurry were as new as the art to her. The throng of men and women in the crowded streets, the Piazza, brilliant with the flare of glowing lamps, the great glass-roofed gallery where the gilded Lombard youth promenaded by night in twos and threes, or sipped absinthe before the doors of dazzling cafés: all these were quite fresh, and all these were, in their way, too, an element of education. There are many who can see no more in Milan than this: they know it only as the most go-ahead and modernised of Italian cities. Linnet knew better. To her it was the town of Leonardo and his disciples, of the great marble pile whose infinite detail escapes and eludes the most observant eye, of the vast and stately opera house where _Otello_ and _Carmen_ first unfolded their wonders of sight and sound to her ecstatic senses. Wiser in her generation, she accepted it aright as the vestibule and ante-chamber of artistic Italy.
From Milan they went on in due time to Florence. There they stopped less long, for opportunities of learning were not by any means so good as at Milan and Naples. But those few short weeks in the City of the Soul were to Linnet as a dream of some artistic Paradise; they made her half forget, for the moment at least, her lost English lover—and her husband’s presence. The Duomo, the Palazzo Vecchio, the Loggia, the Piazza, the old bridge across the Arno, the enchanted market-place; Michael Angelo’s tomb, Giotto’s crusted campanile! What hours she spent, entranced, in the endless halls of the Uffizi and the Pitti; what moments of hushed awe and rapt silence of soul before the pallid Fra Angelicos in the dim cells of San Marco. Ach, Gott, it was beautiful! Linnet gazed with the intense delight of her mountain nature at Raphael’s Madonnas and Andrea’s Holy Families; she stood spellbound before the exquisite young David of the Academia; she wandered with a strange thrill among the marvellous della Robbias and Donatellos of the Bargello. The Tyrolese temperament is before all things artistic. A new sense seemed quickened within Linnet’s soul as she trod those glorious palaces instinct with memories of the Medici and their compeers. A great thirst for knowledge possessed her heart. She read as she had never known how to read before. That Florentine time was as her freshman year in the splendid quadrangles of this Italian Oxford.