Part 4

Nor golden sands nor sheltering combes can slake Your fretful longing for some shore unknown, And through your shrineless pilgrimage you make Unending moan.

THE SEA

Nimbused by sunlight or enwreathed in snow, Lonely you stand, and loftily you soar, While I immeasurably ebb and flow From shore to shore.

I see the palm-dates mellowing in the sun, I hear the snow-fed torrents bound and brawl, And if, where’er I range, content with none, I know them all.

Inward the ice-floes where the walrus whet Their pendent tusks, I sweep and swirl my way, Or dally where ‘neath dome and minaret The dolphins play.

Beneath or bountiful or bitter sky If I myself can never be at rest, I lullaby the winds until they lie Husht on my breast.

THE MOUNTAINS

Till they awake, and from your feeble lap Whirl through the air, and in their rage rejoice: Then you with levin-bolt and thunderclap Mingle your voice.

But I their vain insanity survey, And on my silent brow I let them beat. What is there it is worth my while to say To storm or sleet?

I hear the thunder rumbling through the rain, I feel the lightning flicker round my head; The blizzards buffet me, but I remain Dumb as the dead!

Urged by the goad of stern taskmaster Time, The Seasons come and go, the years roll round. I watch them from my solitude sublime, Uttering no sound.

For hate and love I have nor love nor hate; To be alone is not to be forlorn: The only armour against pitiless Fate Is pitying scorn.

THE SEA

Yet do I sometimes seem to hear afar A tumult in your dark ravines as though You weary of your loneliness, and are Wrestling with woe.

THE MOUNTAINS

When the white wolves of Winter to their lair Throng, and yet deep and deeper sleeps the snow, I loose the avalanche, to shake and scare The vale below.

And, when its sprouting hopes and brimming glee Are bound and buried in a death-white shroud, Then at the thought that I entombed can be, I laugh aloud.

THE SEA

I grieve with grief, at anguish I repine, I dirge the keel the hurricane destroys: For all the sorrows of the world are mine, And all its joys.

And when there is no space ‘twixt surf and sky, And all the universe seems cloud and wave, It is the immitigable wind, not I, That scoops men’s grave.

I wonder how the blast can hear them moan For pity, yet keep deaf unto their prayers. I have too many sorrows of my own, Not to feel theirs.

And when the season of sweet joy comes round, My bosom to their rapture heaves and swells; And closer still I creep to catch the sound Of wedding bells.

I see the children digging in the sand, I hear the sinewy mariners carouse, And lovers in the moonlight, hand-in-hand, Whispering their vows.

You in your lofty loneliness disdain Suffering below and comfort from above. The sweetest thing in all the world is pain Consoled by Love.

After a somewhat lengthened pause, Lamia said: ‘With which do you sympathise, Veronica? With the mountains, or with the sea?’

‘O, with the sea!

‘The sweetest thing in all the world is pain Consoled by Love.‘

‘And you, Sir Poet?’

‘Surely, with both,’ he answered.

‘But,’ she persisted, ‘with which of the two, chiefly?’

‘I suppose,’ he replied, ‘with the ineradicable selfishness of a man, one inclines towards the mountains. _Pacem summa tenent._ Serenity dwells upon the heights.’

LAMIA’S WINTER-QUARTERS

I heard the Poet’s voice in the balcony, followed by the pushing back of heavy _persiane_, and then:

‘Lamia! Come as quickly as you can; I want to show you what you may never have a chance of seeing again.’

There was no reason why, if there was anything new or wonderful to behold, Lamia and the Poet should have a monopoly of the spectacle; so, arraying myself as rapidly as I could, I emerged onto the balcony just as Lamia, in incomplete but most fascinating attire, did the same.

‘Oh!’ she exclaimed. ‘What hills! What slopes! What villas! But where is Florence?’

‘Wait,’ said the Poet, ‘and you shall see. Like you, dear Lamia, she is very fair,’—how I wish I had the courage to address her in that fashion!—‘but, unlike you, she has not yet flowered out of the night.’

‘Neither have I, quite, I fear,’ she said, showing, when thuswise reminded, a quite unnecessary concern respecting her hastily-donned apparel.

‘She is veiled, absolutely veiled, as I have never seen her before, in a, shall I call it, _peignoir_ of white mist, which conceals her utterly from sight. But look! she is beginning to disrobe her marble beauty.’

‘O, what is that, that surges through the mist?‘ ‘That is the noblest symbol of civic liberty in the world, the Tower of the _Palazzo Vecchio_.’

‘And that? And that?‘ ‘The topmost tier of Giotto’s Belfry, worthy, by its sublime simplicity, to serve for the type of all great Art; and, at its side in the rapidly-clearing ether, the cupola of the Duomo, that Michelangelo would not copy and could not better.‘Dome after dome, tower after tower, _campanile_ after _campanile_, surged silently out of the mist; and, to use the Poet’s I hope not too familiar simile, the silvery folds of night sank downward to her feet, and Florence stood in naked loveliness before Lamia’s delighted gaze. Over the eastern hills came the bright vernal sun, every mountain slope broke into smiles and dimples, and in the last of its seaward valleys Arno glanced and gleamed with joy of the expanding dawn. Distance lends enchantment to the sound as well as to the view, and the clang and clash of innumerable belfries came modulated through the intervening air, wherefrom the last lingering trails of mist were gradually wizarded away.

Question and answer followed each other in uninterrupted succession. Yes, that was _San Miniato Al Monte_, with _La Bella Villanella_ hard by; and that beyond was _Santa Margherita_, neighboured by the villa in which Guicciardini completed his History. And yes,—Lamia was quite right,—that was the _Torre del Gallo_, and away to the right and farther up the hills was the Medicean _Poggio-a-Cajano_, where Lorenzo wrote his poem on the _Ambra_. Over the matchless panorama of hill and valley her interrogatories wandered unceasingly, whilst we called on our recollection to supply the names she asked for.

Suddenly, other _persiane_ were pushed back, and Veronica joined us.

‘What are you all doing?’

‘Do you remember,’ answered Lamia, ‘the wife of Cosimo, Pater Patriæ, asking him, when advanced in years, why he so often sate with closed eyes, and his answering that he did so in order to accustom them to what they must soon always be doing? I am opening mine thus early, feeling that, in such a world as this, I shall never be able to close them again.’

* * * * *

‘It is perfect, absolutely perfect,’ said Lamia, ‘and no wonder Politian found it so.’

‘But did Politian really live here?’ I asked.

‘Let us be wise enough to think so,’ said the Poet, ‘and it was quite in keeping with Lorenzo’s magnificence, when that testy scholar, to whom he had committed the tuition of his sons, quarrelled with Donna Clarice because she thought she also should have something to say to their training, to provide him with such a sanctuary. Besides, in Italy, Tradition is not, as some one has said she is elsewhere, a toothless old crone with memory half gone, but the trustworthy depositary of unforgotten glories.‘

‘It is more than a tradition,’ said Veronica. ‘Only this morning I came across a passage from Politian’s correspondence, which would seem to confirm local legend. Here it is. He is writing to Lorenzo. “When you are incommoded by the heat of the season at Careggi, you will perchance bethink you of the shelter of my abode, nor deem it undeserving of your notice. Nestled in the sloping sides of the hill, we have here water in abundance, and, being constantly refreshed by moderate breezes, experience but little inconvenience from the fervour of the sun. As you approach the villa itself, it seems embosomed in a grove; but, when you reach it, you discover that it commands a full view of the city. Though the neighbourhood is not without its denizens, I can here enjoy the solitude so congenial to my disposition. But I can offer you the temptation of other allurements. Wandering beyond his own boundaries, Pico della Mirandola sometimes steals unexpectedly on my retirement, and draws me from my seclusion to share his supper. What that is, you well know; modest indeed, but neatly served, and made grateful by the charm of his converse. But be you my guest. The meal shall be as good, and the wine better.”‘

‘How very philosophic!’ said Lamia. ‘So much so, that the passage was probably written on the morrow of a certain fascinating young woman, whose name I cannot remember, but of whom Politian, I have read, was, notwithstanding his erudition, deeply enamoured, giving her hand to a rival scholar, though which of them, I need scarcely say, I have equally forgotten.’

‘The great Marullus, I think,’ said the Poet; ‘and your fascinating young woman was Alessandra, the accomplished daughter of Lorenzo’s Chancellor, Bartolomeo della Scala, whose house, still standing, you must remind us to show you in Florence.‘ [Illustration: A TUSCAN VILLA]

Our first business was to make acquaintance with the immediate surroundings of the home provided for us by Veronica’s indefatigable foresight, operating through a protracted correspondence none of us had been deemed worthy to peruse. The rural architecture of Tuscany is of a noble simplicity; and, in the main portion of our villa, built in the course of the sixteenth century, there was no deviation from the familiar type. But, adjoining it westward, and seemingly of more ancient date, were an upper and a lower _loggia_ of conventual aspect; the upper one having a sloping roof of rich red tiles supported by graceful pillars of _pietra serena_, and the lower one serving as an Italian equivalent of an English verandah, only more spacious and more tasteful, in which we could sun or shade ourselves according to the mood of the weather. Together, they formed an impenetrable barrier against the well-known keenness of the _tramontana_, while the main building provided ample shelter against possible inclemency from the east. To the west our view was over the final valley of the Arno, that spacious plain of fertile cultivation tenderly protected by hills of exquisite shape and moderate elevation, on whose bolder ridges stand historic towns of unmatched picturesqueness; while southward, over vineyards and olive-groves terraced down precipitously-sloping ground, we gazed on the domes and towers of the fair Tuscan capital. If one lives on the side of a hill, one cannot reasonably expect to have a very vast level expanse for the purposes of a garden. A quadrangular space of modest dimensions between the house and the low boundary wall, where the ground began to fall away, was all that had been dedicated to that pleasurable end; and this afforded Lamia an opportunity of observing that two such enthusiastic horticulturists as the Poet and myself would find but few worlds to conquer in so narrow a territory.

‘Forget,’ I ventured to plead, ‘what it is useless to remember. England is well enough, and so is Italy, but only on condition that you do not ask from the one what belongs to the other. I am not quite sure that the person who is intimately acquainted with both is ever quite satisfied with either, since it is part of our perverse human nature mentally to extol what we have not, to the depreciation of what we have.’

‘Is it to a woman you say that?’ observed Lamia, to my complete confusion. ‘Men preach Philosophy, women practise it; and I shall probably show myself quite content without your well-filled borders, while you inwardly, and perhaps sometimes outwardly, long for your rampant greenery and untidy efflorescence. These _garofani_—you see,’ she said, turning to the Poet, ‘I know the Italian for carnations,—in their tasteful pots along the loopholed wall are much more to my taste than all the straggling annuals and robust perpetuals in the world.’

‘I can see,’ he said, kindly coming to my rescue, ‘you have found your proper home at last. I thought it would be so; and we can only congratulate ourselves on the result. But now let us explore farther afield, and we shall probably find that, if we will only use the word garden in a liberal sense, and indeed in that in which it is used in the corner of England where we have our home, there is more of it than we have just rashly assumed.’

Thereupon, we passed through a cool, spacious _cortile_, cloistered on two of its sides, but for the rest open to the sky, and whose only occupants were a disused fountain and a tall glistening orange-tree covered with golden fruit, of course of the hardy bitter sort; thence under an archway festooned with wistaria not yet in flower, and out into the _podere_, which I must needs call by that name, since there is no English equivalent for it, and which is nowhere to be seen in such perfection as in Tuscany.

‘Indeed, indeed you are right,’ exclaimed Lamia; ‘right as when you once said that, were it always Spring, one would never garden, even in England. O this young green corn, with its purple anemones, its crimson tulips, its pale almond and intensely bright peach blossom, its fantastically growing fig-trees with their budding tips, its burgeoning vines and spectral olive-trees, all dwelling together on the fair hillside that seems to be smiling self-complacently at its own loveliness! Look at that bank of irises, not yet broken from their sheath! But when they have, what a sight they will be!’

It is always delightful to have one’s feelings expressed by some one else in language of enthusiasm one might oneself be afraid to employ; and we accompanied Lamia, as a sort of chorus, echoing all she said, and only too well pleased to follow in her footsteps, as she wandered on and on through a world of beauty wholly new to her.

‘And these lovely grassy paths,’ she said, ‘that lead everywhere and nowhere, tempting one to travel on in search of something unknown, but with ever, on either side, more sprouting wheat, more pendent vines, more crookedly-branching fig-stems, more tulips, more windflowers, more mountains, more glimpses of towers and belfries in the glittering distance. In England everything seems to crouch. Here everything seems to soar.’

Lured onward by Lamia’s enjoyment, and mounting by such easy and gradual slopes that we hardly noticed we were ascending, we suddenly came to a grassy plateau almost encircled by secular cypresses that are the distinctive glory of Tuscany; and here we might have been tempted to halt, had it not been that yet beyond it were rugged paths that zigzagged among tall, dense bushes of white heath and yellow broom, both now in full flower; while on shapeless boulders and protruding rocks were the stars of the white, the yellow, and the rose-coloured cistus. Here and there we came on sheets of the single pink anemone; elsewhere, in the more sheltered nooks, were the Apennine wind-flower which, with due care and choice of position, perhaps you remember, we have persuaded to flourish in the garden that we love.

‘As Veronica has told us that we are to lead a life of strict simplicity,’ said Lamia, ‘we had better do something to make it graceful; and, if you two will only cut some branches of heath and broom, I will be equally energetic among the anemones.’

We were descending homeward with our lovely spoil, when we heard a creaking sound well known to me; and, in another moment, we overtook the slowly-rolling wheels of a wooden wain—of wood, not only in its low, long body, but of wood throughout, with wooden wheels, wooden pole, and wooden yoke—drawn by a couple of cream-coloured steers, and bearing a fragrant load of newly-cut rye-grass. Though at no little inconvenience and delay, on the incline along which it was moving, the peasants who accompanied it at once cried a halt, that they might show their respect to and make the acquaintance of the new-comers. Of the manifold charms of Tuscany, perhaps there is none so great or so enduring as the charm of manner peculiar to its rural population. Frank without being free, deferential but never servile, not without a fine reserve yet with never a touch of shyness, withholding not a certain tribute to social superiority, while tacitly intimating the fundamental equality that appertains to human brotherhood, the demeanour and speech of Tuscan _contadini_ keep intercourse perpetually fresh, and impart to conversation on the tritest and most familiar themes perennial liveliness and interest. Their salutations, frequent though these be, for they would never think of passing you without one, are divested of conventionality by their manifest sincerity. They can never see you, never speak to you, too often; and, whenever they speak, they smile. For thousands of years, morning has risen upon the world, but without any diminution in its freshness; and it is the same with their _Buon giorno, signore_! their _Felice sera, sua signoria_! their _Felicissima notte, e buon riposo_! their _A rivederla_! and all their ancient consecrated phrases for conveying their sense of the strong link that binds human creatures to each other. Every time they say these things, they mean them; nor do they ever tire of the iterated and reiterated courtesies of life. The undeferential nod of Northern manners, the mumbled recognition, the slipshod salutation, would seem shocking to them, as lacking in human piety. On this occasion, no doubt, natural curiosity blended with native good-breeding to make them halt in their labours; for they were, I have no doubt, as eager to make our acquaintance as we were to make theirs. Yet of visible curiosity there was not a trace, as they lifted their hats from their beaded foreheads and remained bareheaded till we begged them to cover themselves. What they conveyed was a fervour of welcome akin to the glow of an Italian sun, a welcome that warmed us through and through, and made us feel that, at that instant, we were forming friendships that, save for some fault of ours, would last through life. Were we all in good health? Had we had a fatiguing journey? Were we comfortable and happy in the villa? They hoped we were going to stay a long time. Could they do anything for us? Did we love Italy? Had we been there before? O, but it was evident we had; for we talked their language like one of themselves (somewhat of an exaggeration, save in the case of Veronica). Yes, the season was fairly forward, and there was good promise for everything, given what was now wanted, plenty of sunshine. Commonplaces, you perhaps will say. Indeed, yes. But which of us in this world is so surprisingly original? The real originality, in some countries I could mention, would be amiability, unfailing courtesy in the ever-recurring trifles of life, a wish to please and to be pleased, and a perpetual freshening of existence by treating nothing in it as a matter of course, or as undeserving of recognition and thankfulness. Even the most original of us are original only sometimes; and, if we are to consort with each other at all, we must needs indulge in a good deal of repetition and commonplace. But freshness of manner can make repetition sound absolutely new, and kindliness of disposition invest the veriest commonplace with an air that everybody shall take for uncommon.

It was with difficulty we led Lamia away from her new acquaintances, not the least attractive of those being the sleek, smooth-coated, soft-eyed oxen that play so large a part in the picturesqueness as in the rural life of Tuscany, and that seemed to appreciate the tender stroking of her hand and the equally soft caress of her voice.

‘I never felt such a bumpkin before,’ she said, ‘as in the presence of those gracious peasants. What barbarians they must think us!’

‘If they thought that of you, Lamia,’ I said, more struck by the exaggeration than by the humility of her remark, ‘they certainly contrived to conceal their impression. Still, speaking generally, rural Tuscany is a school of manners.’

The noble simplicity referred to as the distinguishing mark of villa architecture in Tuscany, is as dominant in the interior as on the exterior of its buildings; ample space being their chief feature and adornment. Unless they have been invaded by modern hands, they depend for effect on bold outlines rather than on decorative detail; and they are furnished in harmony with the same severe taste. When Veronica admonished us that we were to lead a life of strict simplicity, she referred to this circumstance among others.

‘I hope,’ she said, ‘you have left your sybaritic tastes at home. You will find many shapely but no comfortable chairs, no superfluity of cushions, nowhere a footstool, and, if you choose to lie on what looks like a sofa, you will soon find you are not reposing on rose-leaves. You must not come to me and complain that there is not a bell in your room, or, if there is, that it apparently has no communication with the outer world. If Lamia wishes to make a mess indoors with her flowers and branches of blossom, she shall not be denied; but you must not look for those more permanent graces of life to which you are all so attached.’

‘Don’t mind _me_,‘ said Lamia. ‘I am quite prepared to empty my own bath, brush my own skirts, answer the bell instead of ringing it, and live on _fagioli_ and dried _funghi_. Indeed, it was chiefly to indulge in those unusual luxuries that I came to Italy.’

Considering who it is that has created, cherished, and fostered in us those sybaritic tastes, and that attachment to the graces and elegancies of life of which Veronica spoke, and with which she told us we were now to dispense, we may be pardoned, I think, if, at the first opportunity, we indulged in some private humour at her expense. If we are demoralised by domestic luxury, who is it but Veronica that has corrupted us? I protest that most men, in the matter of material comfort, are absolute Spartans, and, as for the Poet, his native austerity was once not to be surpassed, and he still indulges from time to time in his ideal, at any rate in conversation. But he too has, for the most part, succumbed to Veronica’s unequalled capacity for making life at once graceful and commodious; and I am not sure that now he would not, if at home, feel almost wronged if, should he happen to want a paper-cutter, he had to rise from his chair in order to go in search of one.

‘Just you wait!’ said Lamia, ‘and see what becomes of the simple life to which we are to dedicate ourselves. The first time Veronica goes to Florence, she will return, I will engage to say, laden with manifold conveniences of existence, and by degrees she will introduce a world of things into this splendid vacuum; and if, some fine morning, you meet a plumber or bell-hanger on the stairs, you need not regard him as an interloper. Nor would I mind wagering my next quarter’s dress-money that, before long, you will see me sitting in the easiest of easy-chairs, and gracefully reposing on the softest of ottomans.‘