a thousand eyes from her green darkness: tall spikes of some thick-clustering flower rose like blue spires towards heaven: strange green and crimson creatures, where I sat, climbed and sprang from blade to blade of the yellow grass, and fulfilled the functions of a mysterious and happy life: the low note of the wood-pigeon tolled at intervals from a hollow, and the air trembled with the shrill vibrations of cicale: whilst over-head, in the sunset glow, the burning threads of woven cloud unravelled in 'pale air'. Nature proclaimed her sweet insulting invitations to impossible happiness :-O that her hills would fall on me, her mountains cover me, the earth swallow me quick up, forgetfulness at last environ me. Hier oben aber, wie grausamlich Sonne und Rosen stechen sie mich! Mich höhnt der Himmel, der blaülich und mailich O schöne Welt, du bist abscheulich! XXXIII Alas, one passes through these things, and lives. I ran round to the entrance, through the hall to the room where we had been together, and the passages above, and her room, and cried Désirée ! but the echoes were my only answer, unless (who knows?) the angels threw their mockery into its long reverberations. What trace should now be here, and years between which, in the phrase of Tacitus, were a great space of mortal life, of an English maiden's transient inhabitation? Yet I looked thirstingly around: in the madness of despairing love, I thought I could have created relics. . . . ah! it is those who have not put faith to the proof who believe in her miracles. But I saw hung against the wall an old local almanack, thick with names of Saint and Festival, and headed by some rude woodcut, marked Maria Santissima dell' Umiltà. It bore no date: the figures of the year had been either omitted or removed. Long I studied it: this had been, it struck me now for the first time, the very season of my former visit: I endeavoured to recall the exact day and week, and by comparison with their sequence in this almanack discover whether her eyes could, for if so, they necessarily would, have rested upon it. The last rays of the sun were shifting their rosy lustre over the wall, darkness already filling the room from below like a bath, when, whether for blessing or for banning, I knew not, I convinced myself that the paper had been truly placed there in the fatal year-that the anniversary of my own visit was now passing over me. There were steps meanwhile about the house: and presently the steward-gardener left in charge appeared with a tall hanging oil-lamp. His first words, a voluble old man's apology for the state of the rooms,—owing to his wife's absence, he said, that day at the market of Pistoia, relieved me from the fear of a scene of explanation and surprize but surprized me a little with the sense that I seemed again an expected guest at the Tesoretto. Was I not, he continued, a friend of the Englishman who, eight days before, had also, he heard, been noticed in the village close by, wandering round, and asking leave, when he should next pass that way, to go through the house? This claim to welcome I could not allege: but I gave him Padre Girolamo's message: it was my wish to stay, how long I could not decide, here or in the neighbourhood. Antonio said, this was enough: he had in fact prepared a room for the expected visitor: that might be mine. And too glad to be spared further discussion, fearing, and yet half hoping, that this old man, of whom I had no remembrance, might remember the days of Désirée, I asked no more, and consented. It may be added, that who this Englishman might be, or what his purpose, I neither enquired or learned. Was he, too, seeking the phantom of a lost treasure? It struck me afterwards as strange, that on the day Antonio mentioned, I, walking on the Piazzetta of Venice in the long evening, had so vividly painted to myself the whole aspect of this house, that I thought I should find nothing there unfamiliar. There are certainly mysterious refractions and presentiments in the landscape within the soul; moments, hardly traceable, when time seems to suffer transient suspension; dark spaces during which man's spirit appears to wander from itself, to part from conscious identity. But by the very facts of the case we are unable to trace the result or co-ordinate the experiences of such inner alternations: only at times we seem to meet in the present something already familiar in the past, feel perplexedly that we have lived through the actual events before, and find the dream of life even more dreamful. XXXIV Let this be as it may, it was a surprize when the old man led me back to my own remembered room, a relief when without further parley, he said, 'Whilst 'I chose I might remain there, and easily make arrange'ments with the family'. He brought bread and last year's raisins, and the weak wine of Serravalle, and left me with the wish of a repose not to be granted. Then began, (and when to end?) that heavy curse of wakefulness. . one deceives oneself during the day, and books, and work, and other men, and the sight of Nature, distract the soul a little; but I learned henceforth to look with terror for the approach of hours when no one moment of happier thought would break the waste monotony, the spiritual night of loss irretrievable, the blind sense of what I could not forget, and might not think of the almost incredible conviction that here, on this day, I had been blessed with happiness so august and plenary, that Azrael might have carried me from earth through the gate of death to Paradise, and I should have known no transition. In one of the Poets is a picture of more than common vividness: I had admired it often in other days: now it was with me too As when a soul laments, which hath been blest, In yearnings that can never be exprest By sighs or groans or tears O that has been', of all human phrases most pathetic! With this consciousness I lay down: with this thought I was to fall on sleep': and no more bitter fruit on that first fatal day could have been plucked in Eden from the ambrosial Upas of knowledge. It was to confess half a life wasted on the very scene of hope triumphant, to acknowledge shameful defeat, to be face to face with a loss for which death could bring no cure, and heaven no recompense. During these years sorrow had experienced its seasons; resignation that could not comfort, and endeavours which closed in fruitlessness: despair: renunciation and then, the reluctances of remembrance, the reassertion of Love's supremacy, the eternity of passionate regretting. Prayer and patience and submission and the counsels of the wise and the lights of example and the society of friends and the distraction of daily labour, the freedom of activity, the enthralment of studies,-in the sad sobriety of reason I had made trial of every anodyne held restorative. . . . and with this result! The agonies of the awakened conscience, the stings of remorse ;-these : would have been actual delight compared with this bare conviction of bereavement inflicted by the Best Beloved, this blow given by the tender hand, this sunless sterility. The sinner repents, I thought; as the sorrow, so in a certain true sense, the relief is in his own hands; but in this more than lifelong prospect before me, the consoling Angel himself would search in vain for any hint of consolation. : XXXV These imaginations held me long and then silently as sunrise or the soul in the beginnings of life, came the vision, and through the death of sorrow and sleep I passed into the forecourts of recovered Paradise. There is something, I know, less direct, less simply true, in metrical words: yet, as I threw the circumstances of the dream into rhyme and stanza, it will be best now to give it so. Alone alone with Thee Thee only in dreams on a crystalline Sea- Ribb'd as the thousand-tempest-sifted snow And underneath long-furrowing torrents go, And Darling by my side:- Then o'er those silver seas Twice went the shiver of a crisping breeze; The blinding veils thick Custom weaves and Fate, And left the vision clear. |