of forests, the heavy mountain-walls, the great shadows on the snow, the moonlight reflected from shining peaks, in the tenderness and the terror, I saw with bitter pleasure the vestiges of that life of content, pure and full, which exists within every one in image and anticipation; fragments, as it were, of a vast plan of possible and forbidden happiness :- Nature's unfulfilled intention. Merciless! she smiles, and leaves man to his destiny..... This land also, one of her favourite thrones, had failed in its promise. When entering it, as through a golden green vine-trellis at Carouge above Geneva I saw first the glitter and the blue of that inland sea, a sudden warmth had passed through the soul's atmosphere; I had recollected with what seemed hope a noble strain of consolation from a youthful letter of Keats :- -'In truth, the great Elements we know of are no mean comforters; the open sky sits upon our senses like a sapphire crown; the air is our robe of state; 'the earth is our throne, and the Sea a mighty minstrel 'playing before it'. Was not this bravely said? Alas! some readers will remember the confessions of despair wrung from this great genius on his last voyage after loving and losing-cries as of an archangel in agony. These I will not quote; often I regret I read them; I have found them nearer truth than the phrases of exultation. เ XXII Thus I was glad now, if I may use the word any more with meaning, to leave that country. There was no consolation in her purple hills, or her emerald valleys; in the azure of her skies, or the azure of her waters. These great elements are comforters thus far, that they impress with a sense of illimitable freedom and majesty; they distract the soul during a moment's dalliance. But ask for a real compensation, turn to them for a solid sense of happiness. . . . O no: we find we have truly sought the bread of life from stones. In some mysterious mode our existence, the human soul itself, may be bound up with Nature's; but there is a barrier between, insuperable even to the energy of sorrow. We cannot win their serenity from the skies, or their strength from the tempests; we are mocked by the blithesomeness of the bird, and the beauty of the flower. Behind all that amenity of Nature lies a stern passiveness to her children's fate; a quiet irony smiles beyond the veil on 'the playthings of Providence'. The stars in their courses, the sun walking in glory, seem to reprove us; but it is but for a moment. Nature's varied immensity has been spread about us; we have looked on Alp or Atlantic, and felt it perhaps a reproach that the petty transience of our own sad thoughts should assert itself before spaces of a vastness so terrifying, a duration so aeonian. But the curtains are drawn; we lie down to ask in vain for the beloved sleep, an hour's enfranchisement from this aching consciousness; the window-space before us, now pale in the dawning, may open on Baiae or Monte Rosa; what is man, compared with these? but we know that, feeble as we are, within this littleness is concentrated all that has given us knowledge of Nature, and all that has made us capable of Passion; that soul which is truly vaster than the vastness of stellar infinity. We know that few and weary may be the days of the years of this pilgrimage, but that our love has in it a portion of eternity; that this pain .. Ah dearest! could I more lose remembrance of thee than Earth solve her central allegiance, or forsake the Sun? Can sea, or sky, or mountaincrest make compensation for the love sought in vain so fondly? Can these insensate things ransom that loss for a moment - for a moment's moment-for an indivisible atom of these many years of regretting? Can they restore me Désirée ? ... XXIII There was no help for it: had I put a girdle round earth, here must have been the goal; I must be where I had first entered on the manly hope, where I had been with Désirée. เ Many years had indeed passed since, ' and I was then a child'; but I should know that house, and La Collina; I would retrace my steps, and as if compelling Time to retrovolution, descend from Lombardy on those Tuscan sanctuaries. Again I saw Milan, the white Cathedral, the long array of watch-tower Alps from the summit across leagues of verdurous plain, sleeping in the 'ineffable peace' of sunlight; and, perhaps more impressive yet, that great Vision of the Saviour, pale and luminous as the star-cloud revealed by the farthest-piercing telescope, which through the genius of Leonardo has become to many hearts a haunting image and inseparable recollection. of this capital. Then fair Verona, the city of Catullus, twice honoured by the scenic choice of Shakspeare, where the breadth of torrent Adige is darkened by the shadow of throbbing mills, and reflects tower and palace and palacegarden, black cypress and glowing vine,—mingling the russet stain cast below the Scaligeri fortress with violet and amber from encircling hills, and the opal of a twilight sky. How rich in appeals to thought and to thankful enjoyment was that walk, as from San Zeno I returned by the river-side and through lordly palatial streets like the architecture of a dream, till, approaching the central city, gay sounds of market-life from the Piazza delle Erbe and glancing lights radiated through the Gate of Gallienus! Such things depress where they cannot elevate; they are for the happy, I thought, and hastened on; there would be scenes more congenial in the dolorous desolation of the Lido, in the calm decay of what was Venice. There church and palace have suffered a sea-change into something richer - and rarer than the firm land can show; there the Masters of Colour pass before us like the pageantry of some celestial Day; Bellini the dawning, and Titian and Veronese the mid-splendour, and a glory more spiritual than sunset in Tintoretto. And at evening, as I wandered by Procurazie and Piazzetta, whilst the gondoliers lay asleep or singing in their boats, moored and covered for the night, beneath the hazy lamps which tremble by the Madonna on the Cathedral-side, and the tall spectre of that half-shadowed Campanile high over all,— I saw the pavement whitened by a hundred groups, gaily dressed and talking with subdued animation to the sound of song, the undulation of the violoncelli, the impassioned high notes of violin and clarionet, and beyond, the ghostly façade of San Marco, rising tier above tier like an alabaster altar-shrine, an unearthly vision set there to reprove the Venetian crowd for their endless occupation without purpose, and idleness without rest'. All this I saw, but found no glances which could make me less forlorn. . Often, rather, at these and similar moments, in crowded cities, came a spontaneous and irresistible feeling akin perhaps to what many a poor man has experienced at sight of the superabounding wealth of a Capital,-that there must be an error in the mind somewhere; that I was deceiving myself; that amidst this torrent of life and cheerful activity I had but to take my place, to stretch out my arms as it were, and re-enter on healthy happiness. Ah! je voudrais, ne fût-ce que pour un moment, goûter encore de l'espérance! mais c'en est fait, le désert est 'inexorable, la goutte d'eau comme la rivière sont taries, ' et le bonheur d'un jour est aussi difficile que la destinée 'de la vie entière'. XXIV On to La Collina :-something, I fancied, in this total eclipse and blankness of hope, some glimpse of heaven, some reconciliation with earth, was there: I did not enquire too curiously. Leaving Bologna by that eastern road, which at last (without touching Pistoia) through Cafaggiolo reaches Florence, I planned a day's walk; to strike off into the mountains from Lojano across to the Collina route, where at Vergato or La Porretta I should find a diligence or carriage to Pistoia that evening. As indications the villagers gave me the sight of a great summit to the West, and the third stream I should cross ; this would be the Reno, followed by that too-well-remembered road, as I knew, almost throughout its course. Although already far above Mediterranean and Adriatic, both visible from that vast height, and by it lifted into what seemed solid purple walls against the misty and almost colourless horizon,-even at Lojano the outline of the wave-like hills was concealed and repeated by the massy chesnut woods which clothed them; and, by one of those remembrances that Francesca in torments justly held the severest torture, I was reminded of the walnut-gatherers seen as I entered Trèves, now nine summers since, by the fair-haired peasant girls who collected the glowing fruit in rude maize-twisted baskets. But presently these signs of life faded, and I was in the trackless mountain ocean a land of dark green and gray limestone, where a thousand unnamed peaks and masses of splintered rock innumerable, yet each with its own wild and individual shape, formed a landscape of seemingly endless and everchanging monotony. Shelley, whilst a boy yet on the banks of Thames, foresaw a similar scene, and, before his Alastor, wandered through it himself by force of penetrative imagination. The solitude would have been in itself fearful, if to one utterly without hope fear were a passion possible |