FLETCHER’S “FAITHFUL SHEPHERDESS.”—PROBABLE REASON OF ITS NON-SUCCESS.—“COMUS” AND “LYCIDAS.”—DR. JOHNSON’S “WORLD.”—BURNS AND ALLAN RAMSAY.
FLETCHER’S “FAITHFUL SHEPHERDESS.”—PROBABLE REASON OF ITS NON-SUCCESS.—“COMUS” AND “LYCIDAS.”—DR. JOHNSON’S “WORLD.”—BURNS AND ALLAN RAMSAY.
Thetitle and story of theSad Shepherdof Ben Jonson, in combination with those of theFaithful Shepherd(Pastor Fido) of Guarini, appear to have suggested to Fletcher hisFaithful Shepherdess. This is undoubtedly the chief pastoral play in our language, though, with all its beauties, we can hardly think itought to have been such, considering what Shakspeare and Spenser have shown that they could have done in this Arcadian region. The illustrious author, exquisite poet as he was, and son of a bishop to boot, had the misfortune, with his friend Beaumont, to be what is called a “man upon town;” which polluted his sense of enjoyment and rendered him but imperfectly in earnest, even when he most wished to be so. Hence his subserviency to the taste of those painful gentlemen called men of pleasure, and his piecing out his better sentiments with exaggeration. Hence the revolting character, in this play, of a “Wanton Shepherdess,” which is an offence to the very voluptuousness it secretly intended to interest; and hence the opposite offence of the character of the “Faithful Shepherdess” herself, who is ostentatiously made such a paragon of chastity, and values herself so excessively on the self-denial, that the virtue itself is compromised, and you can see that the author had very little faith in it. And we have little doubt that this was the cause why the play was damned (for such is the startling fact), and not the ignorance of the audience, to which Beaumont and Ben Jonson indignantly attributed it. The audience could not reconcile such painful, and, as it must have appeared to them, such hypocritical contradictions: and very distressing to the author mustit have been to find, that he had himself contributed to create that sceptical tone of mind in the public respecting both himself and the female sex, which refused to take him at his word when he was for putting on a graver face, and claiming their ultra-belief in all that he chose to assume. The “Faithful Shepherdess” is a young widow, who is always talking of devoting herself to her husband’s memory; and her lover Thenot is sopassionatelyenamoured of her, that he says if she were to give up the devotion, his passion would be lost. Heentreatsher at once to “hear him” and to “deny!” This child’s play is what the audience could not tolerate. It was a pity; for there are passages in theFaithful Shepherdessas lovely as poet could write. We are never tired of hearing—
How the pale Phœbe, hunting in a grove,First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyesShe took eternal fire that never dies;How she convey’d him softly in a sleep,His temples bound with poppy, to the steepHead of old Latmos, where she stoops each night,Gilding the mountain with her brother’s light,To kiss her sweetest.
So of the dessert gathered by the Satyr for the nymph Syrinx:—
Here be grapes, whose lusty bloodIs the learned poet’s good;Sweeter yet did never crownThe head of Bacchus; nuts more brownThan the squirrel’s teeth that crack them;Deign, oh, fairest fair, to take them.For these black-eyed DriopeHath oftentimes commanded meWith my claspèd knee to climb:See how wellthe lusty timeHath decked their rising cheeks in red,Such as on your lips is spread.Here be berries for a queen,Some be red, some be green;These are of that luscious meat,The great god Pan himself doth eat;All these, and what the woods can yield,The hanging mountain or the field,I freely offer, and ere longWill bring you more, more sweet and strong;Till then humbly leave I take,Lest the great Pan do awake,That sleeping lies in a deep gladeUnder a broad beech’s shade.I must go, I must run,Swifter than the fiery sun.
See also the love made by the river-god at the end of the third Act, which we have not room to quote; and the Satyr’s account of dawn, which opens with the four most exquisite lines perhaps in the whole play:—
See, the day begins to break,And the light shoots like a streakOf subtle fire.—The wind blows cold,While the morning doth unfold.
Who has not felt this mingled charmingness and chilliness (we do not use the words for the sake of the alliteration) at the first opening of the morning! Yet none but the finest poets venture upon thus combining pleasure with something that might be thought a drawback. But it is truth; and it is truth in which the beauty surmounts the pain; and therefore they give it. And how simple and straightforward is every word! There are no artificial tricks of composition here. The words are not suggested to the truth by the author, but to the author by the truth. We feel the wind blowing as simply as it does in nature; so that if the reader be artificially trained, and does not bring a feeling for truth with him analogous to that of the poet, the very simplicity is in danger of losing him the perception of the beauty. And yet there is art as well as nature in the verses; for art in the poet must perfect what nature does by her own art. Observe, for instance, the sudden and strong emphasis on the wordshoots, and the variety of tone and modulation in the whole passage, with the judicious exceptions of the twoo’s in the “wind blows cold,” which have the solemn continuous sound of what it describes: also, the corresponding ones in “doth unfold,” which maintain the like continuity of the growing daylight. And exquisite, surely, is the dilatory andgolden sound of the word “morning” between them:
The wind blows cold,While themor-ning doth unfold.
Milton’sComus, though not equal throughout to theFaithful Shepherdessin descriptive judgment (for it talks of “groves of myrrh and cinnamon” on the banks of a British river), is altogether a finer poem, and a far better recommendation of chastity. Indeed, it might rather have been calledCastitasthanComus; forComushas little justice done to his powers of temptation. Perhaps Fletcher’s failure in recommending chastity suggested the hope of surpassing him to Milton. His emulation of particular passages in theFaithful Shepherdess, particularly on that subject, has been noticed by the commentators. ButComusis a mask, not a pastoral. It can hardly even be called a pastoral mask; for the shepherd is the least person in it; and though the Italians identify the pastoral with the sylvan drama, or fable transacted in the woods, which are the scene of action inComus, the reader feels that the woods have really almost as little to do with it as the fields;—that the moral, in fact, is all in all; which is the reason why nobody takes very heartily to the subject, especially as Milton acts in morals like a kind of solemn partisan, and does not run, likeShakspeare, the whole circle of humanity in arguing his question.
Milton’s only real pastoral (with the exception of the country part of theAllegro) is his allegorical monody on the death of his friend King,—theLycidas; and a beautiful one it is, though Dr. Johnson, in his one-sided misapplication of a right principle, laughed at grief which departs from the ordinary phases of life, and which talks of nymphs and river-gods, and “satyrs with cloven heel.” “Grief,” he said, “does not talk of such things;” to which Warton said very truly, “But Poetry does;” and he might have added (still more literally than he puts it), that Grief does so too, when it is the grief of one young poet mourning for another. Johnson says that Milton and his friend were not “nursed on the same hill,” as represented inLycidas; and that they did not “feed the same flock,” &c. But they were, and they did. They were nursed on the same hill of Arcady, and fed the same flock of the ideal pastoral life; and very grievous it was for them to be torn asunder, to be deprived by death of their mutual delight in Theocritus, and Virgil, and Spenser, the beloved haunts of their minds, things which it has agonized friends and poets to be torn away from, both before and since the time of Milton, however little they may have been cared for by dear, good, dictatorial,purblind, un-ideal Dr. Johnson, whose world, though it was a wit’s and a sage’s world too, was not the universal and still sager world of the poet, but made up (exclusively) of the Strand, hypochondria, charity, bigotry, wit, argument, and a good dinner;—a pretty region, but not the green aswellas smoky world of Nature and Shakspeare.
Fault has been found also with the intermixture of theology inLycidas; but it is to be defended on the same ground—namely, that Milton’s young friend studied theology with him as well as poetry; and hence the propriety of introducing the pilot of the Galilean lake.
One ought to be grateful for it, if only for its giving the poet occasion to dismiss the solemn vision, and encourage, in those lovely verses, the beautiful fictions of Paganism and Theocritus to come back:—
Return, Alphèus; the dread voice is pastThat shrunk thy streams; return,Sicilian Muse,And call the vales, and bid them hither castTheir bells and flowerets of a thousand hues.Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers useOf shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks,On whose fresh lap the swart-star sparely looks,Throw hither all your quaint-enamell’d eyesThat on the green turfsuck the honied showers,And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,The white pink, and the pansy,freak’dwith jet,The glowing violet,The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine,With cowslips wan, that hang the pensive head,And every flower that sad embroidery wears;Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,And daffodillies fill their cups with tears,To strew the laureat herse where Lycid lies.******Thus sang the swain to the oaks and rills,While the still morn went out with sandals grey.
These are the chief pastoral writers in the language of the ideal class. Pope professed to be a classical pastoral writer, and split, accordingly, on the hard rock of Latin imitation. Even Gay’s burlesque pastoral was better, for it went to the real fields for its imagery; and Phillips would have surpassed both, if he had not been affected. His verses from Copenhagen, describing a northern winter, are fresh from Nature.
Allan Ramsay is the prince of the homely pastoral drama. Burns wrote in this class of poetry at no such length as Ramsay; but he was pastoral poetry itself, in the shape of an actual, glorious peasant, vigorous as if Homer had written him, and tender as generous strength, or as memories of the grave. Ramsay and he have helped Scotland for ever to take pride in its heather, and its braes, and its bonny rivers, and beashamed of no beauty or honest truth, in high estate or in low;—an incalculable blessing. Ramsay, to be sure, with all his genius, and though he wrote an entire and excellent dramatic pastoral, in five legitimate acts, is but a small part of Burns;—is but a field in a corner compared with the whole Scots pastoral region. He has none of Burns’s pathos; none of his grandeur; none of his burning energy; none of his craving after universal good. How universal is Burns! What mirth in his cups! What softness in his tears! What sympathy in his very satire! What manhood in everything! If Theocritus, the inventor of a loving and affecting Polyphemus, could have foreseen the verses on theMouseand theDaisyturned up with plough, theTam o’ Shanter, O Willie brew’d a peck o’ maut, Ye banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon, &c., (not to mention a hundred others, which have less to do with our subject,) tears of admiration would have rushed into his eyes.
Nevertheless Allan Ramsay is not only entitled to the designation we have given him, but in some respects is the best pastoral writer in the world. There are, in truth, two sorts of genuine pastoral—the high ideal of Fletcher and Milton, which is justly to be considered the more poetical,—and the homely ideal, as set forth by Allan Ramsay and some of the Idyls of Theocritus, and which gives us such feelings of natureand passion as poetical rustics not only can, but have entertained, and eloquently described. And we think theGentle Shepherd, “in some respects,” the best pastoral that ever was written, not because it has anything, in a poetical point of view, to compare with Fletcher and Milton, but because there is, upon the whole, more faith and more love in it, and because the kind of idealized truth which it undertakes to represent, is delivered in a more corresponding and satisfactory form than in any other entire pastoral drama. In fact, theGentle Shepherdhas no alloy whatsoever to its pretensions,such as they are—no failure in plot, language, or character—nothing answering to the coldness and irrelevances ofComus, nor to the offensive and untrue violations of decorum in the “Wanton Shepherdess” of Fletcher’s pastoral, and the pedantic and ostentatious chastity of his Faithful one. It is a pure, healthy, natural, and (of its kind) perfect plant, sprung out of an unluxuriant but not ungenial soil; not hung with the beauty and fragrance of the productions of the higher regions of Parnassus; not waited upon by spirits and enchanted music; a dog-rose, if you will; say rather, a rose in a cottage-garden, dabbled with the morning dew, and plucked by an honest lover to give to his mistress.
Allan Ramsay’s poem is not only a probable andpleasing story, containing charming pictures, much knowledge of life, and a good deal of quiet humour, but in some respects it may be called classical, if by classical is meant ease, precision, and unsuperfluousness of style. Ramsay’s diction is singularly straightforward, seldom needing the assistance of inversions; and he rarely says anything for the purpose of “filling up;”—two freedoms from defect the reverse of vulgar and commonplace; nay, the reverse of a great deal of what pretends to be fine writing, and is received as such. We confess we never tire of dipping into it, “on and off,” any more than into Fletcher, or Milton, or into Theocritus himself, who, for the union of something higher with true pastoral, is unrivalled in short pieces. TheGentle Shepherdis not a forest, nor a mountainside, nor Arcady; but it is a field full of daisies, with a brook in it, and a cottage “at the sunny end;” and this we take to be no mean thing, either in the real or the ideal world. Our Jar of Honey may well lie for a few moments among its heather, albeit filled from Hybla. There are bees, “look you,” in Habbie’s How. Theocritus and Allan shake hands over a shepherd’s pipe. Take the beginning of Scene ii. Act i., both for description and dialogue:—
A flowrie howm between twa verdant braes,Where lassies use to wash and spread their claes;A trottin’ birnie wimplin’ through the ground,Its channel pebbles shining smooth and round.Here viewtwa barefoot beauties, clean and clear,First please your eye, next gratify your ear,While Jennywhat she wishes discommends,And Meg, with better sense, true love defends.Jenny.Come, Meg, lets fa’ to work upon this green,This shining day will bleach our linen clean:The waters clear, the lift unclouded blue,Will make themlike a lily wet wi’ dew.Peggy.Gae far’er up the burn to Habbie’s How,Where a’ the sweets o’ spring and simmer grow;There ’tween twa birks, out ower a little lin,The water fa’s, and maks a singin’ din;A pool breast-deep, beneath as clear as glass,Kisses, wi’ easy whirls, the bordering grass.We’ll end our washing while the morning’s cool,And when the day grows het, we’ll to the pool,There wash oursells; ’tis healthfu’ now in May,And sweetly cauler on sae warm a day.
This is an out-door picture. Here is an indoor one quite as good—nay, better:—
While Peggy laces up her bosom fair,With a blue snood Jenny binds up her hair;Glaud by his morning ingle takes a beek;The rising sun shines motty through the reek;A pipe his mouth, the lasses please his een,And now and then his joke maun intervene.
We would quote, if we could—only it might not look so proper, when isolated—the whole song at the close ofAct the Second. The first line of it alone is worth all Pope’s pastorals put together, and (we were going to add) half of those of Virgil; but we reverence too much the great follower of the Greeks, and true lover of the country. There is more sentiment, and equal nature, in the song at the end of Act the Fourth. Peggy is taking leave of her lover, who is going abroad:—
At setting day and rising morn,Wi’ saul that still shall love thee,I’ll ask o’ Heaven thy safe return,Wi’ a’ that can improve thee.I’ll visit aft the birkin bush,Where first thou kindly tauld meSweet tales of love,and hid my blush,Whilst round thou didst infald me.To a’ our haunts I will repair,To greenwood, shaw, or fountain;Or where the summer day I’d shareWi’ thee upon yon mountain.There will I tell the trees and flowersFrae thoughts unfeign’d and tender,By vowsyou’re mine,by loveis yoursA heart that cannot wander.
The charming and (so to speak) natural flattery of the loving delicacy of this distinction—
By vowsyou’re mine,by loveis yours,
was never surpassed by a passion the most refined. It reminds us of a like passage in the anonymous words(Shakspeare might have written them) of the fine old English madrigal by Ford, “Since first I saw your face.” Perhaps Ford himself wrote them; for the author of that music had sentiment enough in him for anything. The passage we allude to is—
What, I thatloved, and you thatliked,Shallwebegin to wrangle?
The highest refinement of the heart, though too rare in most classes, is luckily to be found in all; and hence it is, that certain meetings of extremes in lovers of different ranks in life are not always to be attributed either to a failure of taste on the one side, or unsuitable pretensions on the other. Scottish dukes have been known to meet with real Gentle-Shepherd heroines; and everybody knows the story of a lowly Countess of Exeter, who was too sensitive to survive the disclosure of the rank to which her lover had raised her.
ENGLISH PASTORAL.—(Concluded.)
PASTORALS OF WILLIAM BROWNE.—PASTORAL MEN:—CERVANTES—BOCCACCIO—CHAUCER—COWLEY—THOMSON—SHENSTONE, ETC.
PASTORALS OF WILLIAM BROWNE.—PASTORAL MEN:—CERVANTES—BOCCACCIO—CHAUCER—COWLEY—THOMSON—SHENSTONE, ETC.
The onlyundramatic pastorals in the language worth mention are those of Browne, a young poet, who wrote in the beginning of the reign of James the First. He won the praises of Drayton and Ben Jonson, and may remind the reader of some of the earlier poems of Keats. He was a real poet, with a great love of external nature,and much delicacy and generosity of sentiment; and had his judgment been matured, would now have been as much admired by the many as he is regarded by the few. His verses are of such unequal merit, that it is difficult to select any long passage, or scarcely, indeed, any short one, that does not contain matter unworthy of him; yet in all may be discerned promise, in many sweetness and beauty, in some grandeur; and there is nobody who loves poets of the Spenser school, but will have a considerable bit of lurking affection, in the green places of his heart, for William Browne, and lament that he did not live to become famous. Much of hisBritannia’s Pastorals, as he called them, was written before he was twenty. They were collected into a body of English verse, for the first time, by Anderson; but Davies published an edition in three volumes duodecimo; they have been lately reprinted in two; and the lover of poetry and field-walks, who is not always in a mood for higher stimulants, and who can recognise beauty in a hedge-row elm as well as a forest, may reckon himself lucky in being able to put one of them in his pocket. The pastorals consist of a story with a number of episodes, none of which, or story either, can we ever remember; so we will say nothing more about them. The names of the persons hum in our ears, and we have some conception of two or three of the incidents;but the scenes in which they take place, the landscapes, the pastoral images, the idealised country manners, these are what we are thinking of while the story is going on; just as a man should be hearing some local history while going over meadows and stiles, and glancing all the while about him instead of paying it attention. We shall, therefore, devote this article to passages marked with our pen; as the same man might go over the ground afterwards in other company, and say, “There is the church I spoke of, in the trees”—“Yonder is the passage I mentioned, into the wood”—“Here the ivy full of the singing-birds.” We may, perhaps, overrate Browne, out of affection for the things he likes to speak of; but sometimes his powers are not to be mistaken. He calls Cephalus, whom Aurora loved, him
Whose name was wornWithin the bosom of the blushing morn.
Music is
The soul of art,best loved when love is by.
Raleigh, spoken of under the character of a shepherd, is a swain
Whom all the Graces kissed;
and Pan, a god that
With gentle nymphs in forests highKissed out the sweet time of his infancy.
That is very beautiful. Warton, in hisHistory ofPoetry, has expressed his admiration of a “charm” in Browne’sInner Temple Masque, in which, down by the banks of Lethe, dewdrops are said to be for ever hanging
On thelimber grass,Poppy and mandragoras;
and Lethe is described as flowing
Without coil,Softly, like a stream of oil.
The fourth eclogue of hisShepherd’s Pipeis thought, not improbably, to have been in the recollection of Milton, when he wroteLycidas. Like that poem, it is an elegy on the death of a friend. The line marked in the following quatrain might have appeared inLycidas, without any injury to it. It is, indeed, very Miltonic:—
In deepest passions of my grief-swol’n breast,Sweet soul! this only comfort seizeth me,That so few years should make thee so much blest,And give such wings to reach eternity.
In this poem is a description of autumn, in which the different metres are unfortunately but ill-assorted:—they look like bits of elegies begun on different plans; but the third line of the first quatrain is well felt; the fourth not unworthy of it; the watery meadows are capitally painted; and the closing stanza is like an affecting one taken out of some old English ballad:—
Autumn it was, when droop’d the sweetest flowers,And rivers, swollen with pride, o’erlook’d the banks;Poor grew the day of summer’s golden hours,And void of sap stood Ida’s cedar ranks.The pleasant meadowssadly layIn chill and cooling sweatsBy rising fountains, or as theyFear’d winter’s wasteful threats.Against the broad-spread oaksEach wind in fury bears;Yet fell their leaves not half so fastAs did the shepherd’s tears.
The feeling of analogy between the oak, with its scattered leaves, and the naturally strong man shedding tears for sorrow, is in the best imaginative taste. Had Browne written all thus, he would have found plenty of commentators. TheShepherd’s Pipewas a somewhat later production than the other pastorals; and had he lived he would probably have surpassed all that his youth produced. Unfortunately, his mind never appears to have outgrown a certain juvenile ambition of ingenious thoughts and conceits; and it is these that render it so difficult to make any long quotation from his works. The sixth line in the following is very obscure, perhaps corrupted. But the rest has great liveliness and nature:—
Look as a lover, with a lingering kiss,About to part with the best half that’s his;Fain would he stay, but that he fears to do it,And curseth time for so fast hastening to it;Now takes his leave, and yet begins anewTo make less vows than are esteem’d true;Then says he must be gone, and then doth findSomething he should have spoke that’s out of mind;And whilst he standsto look for’t in her eyes,Their sad sweet glance so ties his facultiesTo think from what he parts, that he is nowAs far from leaving her, or knowing how,As when he came; begins his former strain,To kiss, to vow, and take his leave again;Then turns, comes back, sighs, parts, and yet doth go,Apt to retire, and loth to leave her so;—Brave stream, so part I from thy flowery bank.
Browne is fond of drawing his similes from real, and even homely life, and often seems to introduce them for the purpose of giving that kind of variety to a pastoral, otherwise ideal; for though the title of his poem is British, and the scene also, it is in other respects Arcadian and Pagan. The effect is somewhat jarring; and yet it is impossible to quarrel with the particular descriptions:—
As children on a play-day leave the schools,And gladly run into the swimming pools;Or in the thickets, all with nettles stung,Rush to despoil some sweet thrush of her young;Or with their hats for fish lade in a brookWithouten pain; but when the morn doth lookOut of the eastern gates, a snail would fasterGlide to the schools, than they unto their master;So when before I sung the songs of birds, &c.
The following is a complete picture:—
—As a nimble squirrel from the wood,Ranging the hedges for his filbert food,Sits partly on a bough, his brown nuts cracking,And from the shell the sweet white kernel taking,Till, with their crooks and bags, a sort of boysTo share with him, come with so great a noise,That he is forced to leave a nut nigh broke,And for his life leap to a neighbour oak,Thence to a beech, thence to a row of ashes,Whilst through the quagmires and red water plashesThe boys run dabbling through thick and thin;One tears his hose, another breaks his shin;This, torn and tattered, hath with much adoGot to the briers, and that hath lost his shoe;This dropt his band, that headlong falls for haste,Another cries behind for being last;With sticks and stones, and many a sounding hollow,The little pool with no small sport they follow,Whilst he from tree to tree, from spray to sprayGets to the wood, and hides him in his dray;Such shift made Riot, ere he could get up, &c.
Here is another picture, still homelier, but equally complete, and as robust in its full-grown strength as the other is light and boyish:—
As when a smith and’s man (lame Vulcan’s fellows),Called from the anvil or the puffing bellowsTo clap a well-wrought shoe, for more than pay,Upon a stubborn nag of Galloway,Or unback’d jennet, or a Flanders mare,That at the forge stands snuffing of the air;The swarthy smith spits in his buck-horn fist,And bids his men bring out the five-fold twist,His shackles, shacklocks, hampers, gyves, and chains,His linkèd bolts; and with no little painsThese make him fast; and lest all these should faulter,Unto a post, with some six-doubled halter,He binds his head; yet all are of the leastTo curb the fury of the headstrong beast;When, if a carrier’s jade be brought unto him,His man can hold his foot while he can shoe him;Remorse was so enforced to bind him stronger.
This is a Dutch picture, or one that Mr. Crabbe might have admired. The following might have adorned the pages of Spenser himself. The ascension of the fogs and mists, and the cessation of all noise, are in a true—nay, in a high spirit of grandeur; and the very delicacy of the conclusion adds to it. The sense of hushing solemnity is drawn to the finest point:—
Now great Hyperion left his golden throne,That on the dancing waves in glory shone;For whose declining on the western shoreThe oriental hills black mantles wore;And thence apace the gentle twilight fled,That had from hideous caverns usherèdAll-drowsy Night; who in a car of jet,By steeds of iron-grey (which mainly sweatMoist drops on all the world) drawn through the sky,The helps of darkness waited orderly.First, thick clouds rose from all the liquid plains;Then mists from marishes, and grounds whose veinsWere conduit-pipes to many a crystal spring;From standing pools and fens were followingUnhealthy fogs; each river, every rill,Sent up their vapours to attend her will.These pitchy curtains drew ’twixt earth and heaven,And as Night’s chariot through the air was driven,Clamour grew dumb; unheard was shepherd’s song,And silence girt the woods: no warbling tongueTalk’d to the echo; satyrs broke their dance,And all the upper world lay in a trance;Only the curling streams soft chidings kept:And little gales, that from the green leaf sweptDry summer’s dust, in fearful whisp’ring stirr’dAs loth to waken any singing bird.
Browne was a Devonshire man, and is supposed to have died at Ottery St. Mary, the birthplace of Coleridge. He was not unworthy to have been the countryman of that exquisite observer of Nature, himself a pastoral man, though he wrote no pastorals; for Coleridge not only preferred a country to a town life, but his mind as well as his body (when it was not with Plato and the schoolmen) delighted to live in woody places, “enfolding,” as he beautifully says,
Sunny spots of greenery.
And how many other great and good men have there not been, with whom the humblest lover of Arcady may, in this respect, claim fellowship?—men, nevertheless, fond of town also, and of the most active and busy life, when it was their duty to enter it. The most universal genius must of necessity include the green districts ofthe world in his circle, otherwise he would not run it a third part round. Shakspeare himself, prosperous manager as he was, retired to his native place before he was old. Do we think that, with all his sociality, his chief companions there were such as a country town afforded? Depend upon it, they were the trees, and the fields, and his daughter Susanna. Be assured, that no gentleman of the place was seen so often pacing the banks of the Avon, sitting on the stiles in the meadows, looking with the thrush at the sunset, or finding
Books in the running brooks,Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
Cervantes, the Shakspeare of Spain, (for if his poetry answered but to one small portion of Shakspeare, his prose made up the rest,) proclaims his truly pastoral heart, notwithstanding his satire, not only in hisGalatea, but in a hundred passages ofDon Quixote, particularly the episodes. He delighted equally in knowledge of the world and the most ideal poetic life. It is easy to see, by the stories ofMarcellaandLeandra, that this great writer wanted little to have become a Quixote himself, in the Arcadian line! Nothing but the extremest good sense supplied him a proper balance in this respect for his extreme romance.
Boccaccio was another of these great child-like minds, whose knowledge of the world is ignorantly confoundedwith a devotion to it. See, in hisAdmetus, andTheseid, andGenealogia Deorum, &c., and in theDecameronitself, how he revels in groves and gardens; and how, when he begins making a list of trees, he cannot leave off. Doubtless, he had been of a more sensual temperament than Cervantes; but his faith remained unshaken in the highest things. His veins might have contained an excess of the genial; but so did his heart. When the priest threatened him in advanced life with the displeasure of Heaven, he was shocked and alarmed, and obliged to go to Petrarch for comfort.
Chaucer was a courtier, and a companion of princes; nay, a reformer also, and a stirrer out in the world. He understood that world, too, thoroughly, in the ordinary sense of such understanding; yet, as he was a true great poet in everything, so in nothing more was he so than in loving the country, and the trees and fields. It is as hard to get him out of a grove as his friend Boccaccio; and he tells us, that, in May, he would often go out into the meadows to “abide” there, solely in order to “look upon the daisy.” Milton seems to have made a point of never living in a house that had not a garden to it.
A certain amount of trusting goodness, surviving twice the worldly knowledge possessed by those who take scorn for superiority, is the general characteristic of men of this stamp, whether of the highest order ofthat stamp or not. Cowley, Thomson, and Shenstone were such men. Shenstone was deficient in animal spirits, and condescended to be vexed when people did not come to see his retirement; but few men had an acuter discernment of the weak points of others and the general mistakes of mankind, as anybody may see by hisEssays; and yet in thoseEssayshe tells us, that he never passed a town or village, without regretting that he could not make the acquaintance of some of the good people that lived there. Thomson’s whole poetry may be said to be pastoral, and everybody knows what a good fellow he was; how beloved by his friends; how social, and yet how sequestered; and how he preferred a house but a floor high at Richmond (for that which is now shown as his, was then a ground-floor only), to one of more imposing dimensions amidst
The smoke and stir of this dim spot,Which men callLondon.
Cowley was a partisan, a courtier, a diplomatist; nay, a satirist, and an admirable one, too. See hisCutter of Coleman Street, the gaiety and sharpness of which no one suspects who thinks of him only in the ordinary peacefulness of his reputation; though, doubtless, he would have been the first man to do a practical kindness to any of the Puritans whom he laughed at. His friends the Cavaliers thought he laughed at themselves, in thisvery comedy; so much more did he gird hypocrisy and pretension in general than in the particular: but Charles the Second said of him after his death, that he had “not left a better man behind him in England.” His partisanship, his politics, his clever satire, his once admired “metaphysical” poetry, as Johnson calls it, nobody any longer cares about; but still, as Pope said,
We love the language of his heart.
He has become a sort of poetical representative of all the love that existed of groves and gardens in those days—of parterres, and orchards, and stately old houses; but above all, of the cottage; a taste for which, as a gentleman’s residence, seems to have originated with him, or at least been first avowed by him; for we can trace it no farther back. “A small house and a large garden” was his aspiration; and he obtained it. Somebody, unfortunately, has got our Cowley’sEssays—we don’t reproach him, for it is a book to keep a good while; but they contain a delightful passage on this subject, which should have been quoted. Take, however, an extract or two from the verses belonging to thoseEssays. They will conclude this part of our subject well:
Hail, old patrician trees, so great and good!Hail, ye plebeian underwood!Where the poetic birds rejoice,And for their quiet nests and plenteous food,Pay with their grateful voice.Here let me, careless and unthoughtful lying,Hear the soft winds above me flying,With all their wanton boughs dispute,And the more tuneful birds to both replying,Nor be myself, too, mute.Ah! wretched and too solitary he,Who loves not his own company!He’ll feel the weight of it many a day,Unless he call in sin or vanity,To help to bear ’t away.******When Epicurus to the world had taughtThat Pleasure was the Chiefest Good,(And was, perhaps, i’ th’ right, if rightly understood,)His life he to his doctrine brought,And in a garden’s shade that sovereign pleasure sought.******Where does the wisdom and the power divineIn a more bright and sweet reflection shine—Where do we finer strokes and colours seeOf the Creator’s real poetry,Than when we with attention lookUpon the third day’s volume of the book?If we could open andintendour eye,We all, like Moses, should espy,Ev’n in a bush, the radiant Deity.******Methinks I see great Diocletian walkIn the Salonian garden’s noble shade,Which by his own imperial hands was made.I see him smile, methinks, as he does talkWith the ambassadors, who come in vainTo entice him to a throne again.“If I, my friends,” said he, “should to you showAll the delights which in these gardens grow,’Tis likelier much that you should with me stay,Than ’tis that you should carry me away;And trust me not, my friends, if every dayI walk not here with more delight,Than ever, after the most happy fight,In triumph to the capitol I rode,To thank the gods, and to be thought, myself, almost a god.”
A noble line that—long and stately as the triumph which it speaks of. Yet the Emperor and the Poet agreed in preferring a walk down an alley of roses. There was nothing so much calculated to rebuke or bewilder them there, as in the faces of their fellow-creatures, even after the “happiest fight.”
RETURN TO SICILY AND MOUNT ÆTNA.
SUBJECT OF MOUNT ÆTNA RESUMED:—ITS BEAUTIES—ITS HORRORS—REASON WHY PEOPLE ENDURE THEM.—LOVE-STORY OF AN EARTHQUAKE.
SUBJECT OF MOUNT ÆTNA RESUMED:—ITS BEAUTIES—ITS HORRORS—REASON WHY PEOPLE ENDURE THEM.—LOVE-STORY OF AN EARTHQUAKE.
Innow emphatically returning to Sicily, though we have never been entirely absent from it, while discussing the pastoral poets of other countries, weshall round our subject properly by finishing the circle where we began it; and in order to render our plan as complete as possible, we have not been without a sense of chronological order. In resuming, therefore, the subject of Ætna, we proceed to regard the mountain in relation to the impression it makes on modern times and existing inhabitants.
The reader is aware that our Jar was not intended to be associated with nothing but sweets. Bees, it was observed, extract honey from the bitterest as well as sweetest flowers; and we only stipulated, as they do, for a sweet result;—for something, which by the fact of its being deducible from bitterness, shows the tendency of Nature to that dulcet end, and gives a lesson to her creature man to take thought and warning, and do as much for himself. In truth, were man heartily to do so, and leave off asking Nature to superintend everything for him, and take the trouble off his hands, which it seems a manifest condition of things that she should not (man looking very like an experiment to see how far he can develop the energies of which he is composed, and prove himself worthy of continuance), how are we to know that he would not get rid of all such evils as do not appear to be necessary to his well-being, and, in the language of the great Eastern poet, make “the morning stars sing for joy?”—sing for joy, that another heavenis added to their list. Mount Ætna, for instance, which is one of the safety-valves of the globe, does notforcepeople to live within the sphere of its operations. Why, therefore, should they? Why do not the inhabitants of Catania and other places migrate, as nations have done from the face of an enemy or famine, and plant themselves elsewhere? When the convulsion comes, and destruction hovers over them, the saints are implored as the gods were of old, and everything is referred to the ordinances of Heaven. But the saints might answer, “Why do you continue to live here, in the teeth of these repeated warnings? Why cannot the earth have safety-valves, but you must needs plant yourselves right in the way of them, as infants may do with steam-engines?” This is the honey that might be extracted from the bitter past. On the other hand, if this be idle speculation, and the reason of the thing be on the side of continuing to implore the saints and perishing in earthquakes, then Nature, who is always determined to have no evil unmixed, suggests topics of consolation from the greater amount of good; from the far longer duration of the periods of serenity and joy around the mountain, compared with those of convulsion; and from all those images of beauty and abundance, which produce another honey against the bitterness of what cannot be altered. The bee himself, like the nightingaleand the dove, and other beautiful creatures, is an inhabitant of Ætna. The fires of the mountain help to produce some of his sweetest thyme. The energetic little, warmth-loving, honey-making, armed, threatening, murmuring, bitter-sweet, and useful creature, seems like one of the particles of the mountain, gifted with wings. We might as well have brought our honey from Mount Ætna as Mount Hybla, and very likely it actually came thence; only the latter, like Mount Hymettus, is identified with the word, and its supposed district still famous for the product. In fact (though the name seems to be no longer retained anywhere) there were several Hyblas of old, one of them at the foot of Ætna; so that our Jar may come from both places. The word, which is older than Greek, was probably Phœnician, from a root signifying mellifluence; unless it originated in the sound of the bubbling of brooks, of the neighbourhood of which bees are fond.
We cannot quit Mount Ætna without saying something more of it, especially as it has lately been in action, not without hints of its operation as far as Scotland, where there have been many shocks of earthquake. Everybody knows that Ætna is the greatest volcano in Europe, some twenty miles in ascent from Catania, and with a circumference for its base of between eighty and ninety. All the climates of the world arethere, except those of the African desert. At the foot are the palms and aloes of the tropics, with the corn, wine, and oil of Italy. The latter continue for fourteen or fifteen miles of ascent. Then come the chestnuts of Spain, then the beeches of England, then the firs of Norway—the whole forest-belt being five or six miles in ascent, interspersed with park-like scenery, and the most magnificent pastures. Singing-birds, and flocks and herds are there, with abundance of game. The remainder, a thousand feet high, is a naked peak, covered for the greater part of the year with snow, but often hot to the feet in the midst of it, toilsome to ascend, and terminating in the great crater, miles in circumference, fuming and blind with smoke—the largest of several others. The whole mountain, with an enormous chasm in its side four or five miles broad, stands in the midst of six-and-thirty subject mountains, “each a Vesuvius,” generated by its awful parent. Horror and loveliness prevail throughout it, alternately, or together. You look from mountain to mountain, over tremendous depths, to the most beautiful woody scenery. The lowest region is a paradise, betraying black grounds of lava, and beds of ashes, which remind you to what it is liable. The top is a ghastly white peak, shivering with cold, though it is a mouth for fire, but lovely at a distance in the light of the moon atnight, and presenting a view from it by day, especially at sunrise, which baffles description with ecstasy. Count Stolberg, a German poet, who beheld this spectacle in the year 1792, when the mountain was in action, says, that by the dawning light of the day he saw nothing round about him but snow and black ashes, vast masses of lava, and a smoking crater, together with a huge bed of clouds, the darkening extremities of which the eye could not clearly distinguish either from the mountains or the sea, “till the majestic sun rose in fire, and reduced every object to order.—Chaos seemed to unfold itself, where no four-footed beast, no bird, interrupted the solemn silence of the formless void:
Wo sie keinen Todten begruben, und keiner erstehen wird,
as Klopstock says of the ice-encircled pole:
No dead are buried there; nor any there will rise.
“Ætna cast his black shades,” continues he, “over the grey dawn of the western atmosphere; while round him stood his sons, but far beneath, yet volcanic mountains all, in number six-and-thirty, each a Vesuvius. To the north, the east, and the south, Sicily lay at our feet, with its hills, and rivers, and lakes, and cities. In the low deep, the clouds, tinged with purple, were dispersed and vanished from the presence of the goldensun; while their shades flying before the west wind, were scattered over the landscape far and wide.”[7]
Mr. Hughes’s description is minuter, yet still more effective. “At length,” says he, “faint streaks of light, shooting athwart the horizon, which became brighter and brighter, announced the approach of the great luminary; and when he sprang up in his majesty, supported on a throne of radiant clouds, that fine scriptural image of the giant rejoicing to run his course, flashed across my mind. As he ascended in the sky, the mountain tops began to stream with golden light, and new beauties successively developed themselves, until day dawned upon the Catanian plains. Sicily then lay expanded like a map beneath our eyes, presenting a very curious effect; nearly all its mountains could be descried, with the many cities that surmount their summits; more than half its coasts, with their bays, indentations, towns, and promontories, could be traced, as well as the entire course of rivers, sparkling like silver bands that encircle the valleys and the plains. Add to this the rich tints of so delightful an atmosphere; add the dark blue tract of sea rolling its mysterious waves, as it were, into infinite space; add that spirit of antiquity which lingers in these charming scenes,infusing a soul into the features of nature, as expression lights up a beautiful countenance; and where will you find a scene to rival that which is viewed from Ætna?”[8]
Compare this spectacle with one of the great eruptions, and the agonising days that precede it. Smoke and earthquake commence them. The days are darkened; the nights are sleepless and horrible, and seem ten times as long as usual. People rush to the churches in prayer, or crowd the doorways (which are thought the safest places), or remain out of doors in boats or carriages. Religious processions move in terror through the streets. Sometimes the air is blackened with a powder, sometimes with ashes, which fall and gather everywhere, such as Pompeii was buried with. Lightnings play about Ætna; the sea rises against the dark atmosphere, in ghastly white billows; dreadful noises succeed, accompanied with thunder, like batteries of artillery; the earth rocks; landslips take place down the hill-sides, carrying whole fields and homesteads into other men’s grounds; cities are overthrown, burying shrieking thousands. At length, the mountain bursts out in flame and lava, perhaps in forty or fifty places at once, the principal crater throwing out hot glowing stones, which have been known to be carried eighteenmiles, and the frightful mineral torrent running forth in streams of fiery red, pouring down into the plains, climbing over walls, effacing estates, and rushing into and usurping part of the bed of the sea. A river of lava has been known to be fifty feet deep, and four miles broad.[9]Fancy such a stream coming towards London, as wide as from Marylebone to Mile End! By degrees, the lava thickens into a black and rustling semi-liquid, rather pushed along than flowing; though its heat has been found lingering after a lapse of eight years. When the survivors of all these horrors gather breath, and look back upon time and place, they find houses and families abolished, and have to begin, as it were, their stunned existence anew.
Yet they build again over these earthquakes. They inhabit and delight in this mountain. Catania, the city at its foot, which has been several times demolished, is one of the gayest in Italy.
How is this?
The reason is, that all pain, generally speaking, is destined to be short and fugitive, compared with the duration of a greater amount of pleasure;—that the souls which perish in the convulsion, were partakers of that pleasure for the greater part of their lives, perhaps the gayest of the gay city;—that all of them were bornthere, or connected with it;—that it is inconvenient, perhaps without government aid impossible, to remove, and commence business elsewhere;—that they do not think the catastrophe likely to recur soon, perhaps not in the course of their lives;—nay, that possibly there may be something of a gambling excitement,—of the stimulus of a mixture of hope and fear,—in thus living on the borders of life and death—of this great snap-dragon bowl of Europe—especially surrounded as they are with the old familiar scenes, and breathing a joyous atmosphere. But undoubtedly the chief reasons are necessity, real or supposed, and the natural tendency of mankind to make the best of their position and turn their thoughts from sadness. So the Catanian goes to his dinner, and builds a new ball-roomout of the lava!
Perhaps the most touching of all the consolations to be met with in the history of these catastrophes, is the testimony they bear to the maternal affections. The men who perish from the overthrow of houses are said to be generally found in attitudes of resistance:—the women are bent double over their children. The great vindication of evil is, that (constituted as we are) we could not know so much joy, nor manifest so much virtue without it; and certainly, in instances like these, it fetches out, under circumstances of the extremest weakness, the most beautiful strength of the humanheart. Still, such wholesale trials of it do not appear to be demanded by any unavoidable necessity. The fact forces itself upon the mind, that human beings need not continue to live in such places, and that the geological well-being of the globe does not demand it. As to animals of the inferior creation, who are destroyed at these times, assuredly they know almost as little about it till the last moment, as the lamb who licks the hand of his slayer; and as soon as the mountain is cleared, the larks and nightingales are again singing, and the bees enjoying the flowers in its most awful ravines.
For months, for years, sometimes for a hundred years and more, perhaps for many hundreds, this tremendous phenomenon is quiet. Homer does not seem to have heard of its burning. The volcano first makes its appearance in Pindar. Theocritus knew its capabilities well; yet he speaks of it as nothing but a seat of pastoral felicity. His Polyphemus contrasts its serenity with the dangers of the sea; and another of his shepherds, in answer to an observation about fathers and mothers, says to a shepherd of the plains, that Ætna ishismother, and that he is as rich in sheep and goats as the latter fancies himself to be during dreams. The first recorded eruption of Ætna was in the time of Empedocles, about five hundred years before Christ; and from that time to the year 1819 inclusive,a French writer has calculated that there have been seventy-two othersmentioned.[10]We cannot say how many more have ensued. The one that not long ago took place was harmless, we believe, as far as lives were concerned, except to some rash persons who were too anxious to see the effect of the lava upon a pool of water. The pool turned into steam, and scalded them. Slight eruptions are little regarded, and indeed are little dangerous compared with what precedes them. The worst peril is the earthquake. The lava, though an ugly customer, can be safelier treated with. Even slight earthquakes are not much heeded, after the first alarm. Mr. Vaughan, an English traveller in the year 1810, says, that upon his going into the town of Messina, after a slight shock, from his country-lodging, and approaching the carriages in which some ladies were sitting in expectation of another, he said to one of them, an acquaintance of his, “Is it not shocking?” “It is indeed very shocking,” said the lady. “You were not at the Opera?”[11]Humboldt speaks of a young lady in South America, who was so accustomed to these visitations, that she thought the topic vulgar. She expressed a wish that people would leave off talking about “these nasty earthquakes.”
If you tell a Sicilian that there are no earthquakes in England, he acknowledges, of course, the merit of their absence, but smiles to think that you can suppose it a compensation for the want of vines and olives. The following amusing conversation took place in an inn, between the English traveller just mentioned and a priest and his landlady, at Caltagirone. The priest, “after many apologies for the liberty he was taking,” says Mr. Vaughan, “begged to converse with me upon the subject of England, which the people of these parts were very anxious to hear about, as the opportunity of inquiring so seldom occurred; and, by the time I had dined, I observed a dozen people collected round the door, with their eyes and mouths open, to hear the examination.
“‘And pray, Signor, is it true what we are told, that you have no olives in England?’[12]
“‘Yes, perfectly true.’
“‘Cospetto!how so?’
“‘Cospettone!’[13]said the lady.
“‘Our climate is not propitious to the growth of the olive.’
“‘But then, Signor, for oranges!’
“‘We have no oranges neither.’
“‘Poveretto!’ said the landlady, with a tone of compassion; which is a sort of fondling diminutive of ‘Povero,’ ‘Poor creature,’ or as you would say to your child, ‘Poor little fellow!’
“‘But how is that possible, Signor?’ said the priest. ‘Have you no fruit in your country?’
“‘We have very fine fruit; but our winters are severe, and not genial enough for the orange-tree.’
“‘That is just what they told me,’ said the lady, ‘at Palermo, that England is all snow, and a great many stones.’
“‘But then, Signor, we have heard, what we can scarcely believe, that you have not any wine?’
“‘It is perfectly true. We have vines that bear fruit; but the sun in our climate is not sufficiently strong, which must be boiling, as it is here, to produce any wine.’
“‘Then, Jesu Maria! how the deuce do you do?’
“I told them that, notwithstanding, we got on pretty well; that we had some decent sort of mutton, and very tolerable-looking beef; that our poultry was thought eatable, and our bread pretty good; that, instead of wine, we had a thing they call ale, which our people, here and there, seemed to relish exceedingly; and that, by the help of these articles, a goodconstitution,and the blessing of God, our men were as hardy, and as loyal and brave, and our women as accomplished, and virtuous, and handsome, as any other people, I believed, under heaven.
“‘Besides, Mr. Abbate, I beg leave to ask you, what cloth is your coat of?’
“‘Cospetto!it is English!’ with an air of importance.
“‘And your hat?’
“‘Why, that’s English.’
“‘And this lady’s gown, and her bonnet and ribbons?’
“‘Why, they are English.’
“‘All English. Then you see how it is: we send you, in exchange for what we don’t grow, half the comforts and conveniences you enjoy in your island. Besides,padrona mia gentile(my agreeable landlady), we can never regret that we don’t grow these articles, since it ensures us an intercourse with a nation we esteem!’
“‘Viva!’ (‘Long life to you’), said the landlady, and ‘Bravo!’ said the priest; and betweenbravoandviva, the best friends in the world, I escaped to my lettiga (litter).”[14]
We must close this article with a love-story, in connexion with the dreadful earthquake of 1783, whichdestroyed Messina, and swept into the sea,in one moment, nearly three thousand persons on the opposite coast of Scylla, together with their prince.[15]The reader may believe as much of the love as he pleases, but the extraordinary circumstance on which it turns is only one of a multitude of phenomena, all true and marvellous.
Giuseppe, a young vine-grower in a village at the foot of the mountains looking towards Messina, was in love with Maria, the daughter of the richest bee-master of the place; and his affection, to the great displeasure of the father, was returned. The old man, though he had encouraged him at first, wished her to marry a young profligate in the city, because the latter was richer and of a higher stock; but the girl had a great deal of good sense as well as feeling; and the father was puzzled how to separate them, the families having been long acquainted. He did everything in his power to render the visits of the lover uncomfortable to both parties; but as they saw through his object, and love can endure a great deal, he at length thought himself compelled to make use of insult. Contriving, therefore, one day to proceed from one mortifying word toanother, he took upon him, as if in right of offence, to anticipate his daughter’s attention to the parting guest, and show him out of the door himself, adding a broad hint that it might be as well if he did not return very soon.
“Perhaps, Signor Antonio,” said the youth, piqued at last to say something harsh himself, “you do not wish the son of your old friend to return at all?”
“Perhaps not,” said the bee-master.
“What,” said the poor lad, losing all the courage of his anger in the terrible thought of his never having any more of those beautiful lettings out of the door by Maria,—“what! do you mean to say I may not hope to be invited again, even by yourself?—that you yourself will never again invite me, or come to see me?”
“Oh, we shall all come, of course, to the great Signor Giuseppe,” said the old man, looking scornful,—“all cap in hand.”
“Nay, nay,” returned Giuseppe, in a tone of propitiation; “I’ll wait till you do me the favour to look in some morning, in the old way, and have a chat about the French; and perhaps,” added he, blushing, “you will then bring Maria with you, as you used to do; and I won’t attempt to see her till then.”
“Oh, we’ll all come of course,” said Antonio, impatiently; “cat, dog, and all; and when wedo,” addedhe, in a very significant tone, “you may come again yourself.”
Giuseppe tried to laugh at this jest, and thus still propitiate him; but the old man hastening to shut the door, angrily cried, “Ay, cat, dog, and all, and the cottage besides, with Maria’s dowry along with it; and then you may come again,and not till then.” And so saying, he banged the door, and giving a furious look at poor Maria, went into another room to scrawl a note to the young citizen.
The young citizen came in vain, and Antonio grew sulkier and angrier every day, till at last he turned his bitter jest into a vow; exclaiming with an oath, that Giuseppe should never have his daughter, till he (the father), daughter, dog, cat, cottage, bee-hives, and all, with her dowry of almond-trees to boot, set out some fine morning to beg the young vine-dresser to accept them.
Poor Maria grew thin and pale, and Giuseppe looked little better, turning all his wonted jests into sighs, and often interrupting his work to sit and look towards the said almond-trees, which formed a beautiful clump on an ascent upon the other side of the glen, sheltering the best of Antonio’s bee-hives, and composing a pretty dowry for the pretty Maria, which the father longed to see in possession of the flashy young citizen.
One morning, after a very sultry night, as the poor youth sat endeavouring to catch a glimpse of her in this direction, he observed that the clouds gathered in a very unusual manner over the country, and then hung low in the air, heavy and immovable. Towards Messina the sky looked so red, that at first he thought the city on fire, till an unusual heat affecting him, and a smell of sulphur arising, and the little river at his feet assuming a tinge of a muddy ash-colour, he knew that some convulsion of the earth was at hand. His first impulse was a wish to cross the ford, and, with mixed anguish and delight, to find himself again in the cottage of Antonio, giving the father and daughter all the help in his power. A tremendous burst of thunder and lightning startled him for a moment; but he was proceeding to cross, when his ears tingled, his head turned giddy, and while the earth heaved beneath his feet, he saw the opposite side of the glen lifted up with a horrible deafening noise, and then the cottage itself, with all around it, cast, as he thought, to the ground, and buried for ever. The sturdy youth, for the first time in his life, fainted away. When his senses returned, he found himself pitched back into his own premises, but not injured, the blow having been broken by the vines.
But on looking in horror towards the site of the cottage up the hill, what did he see there? or rather,what did henotsee there? And whatdidhe see, forming a new mound, furlongs down the side of the hill, almost at the bottom of the glen, and in his own homestead?
Antonio’s cottage:—Antonio’s cottage, with the almond-trees, and the bee-hives, and the very cat and dog, and the old man himself, and the daughter (both senseless), all come, as if, in the father’s words, to beg him to accept them! Such awful pleasantries, so to speak, sometimes take place in the middle of Nature’s deepest tragedies, and such exquisite good may spring out of evil.
For it was so in the end, if not in the intention. The old man (who, together with his daughter, had only been stunned by terror) was superstitiously frightened by the dreadful circumstance, if not affectionately moved by the attentions of the son of his old friend, and the delight and religious transport of his child. Besides, though the cottage and the almond-trees, and the bee-hives, had all come miraculously safe down the hill (a phenomenon which has frequently occurred in these extraordinarylandslips), the flower-gardens, on which his bees fed, were almost all destroyed; his property was lessened, his pride lowered; and when the convulsion was well over, and the guitars were again playing in the valley, he consented tobecome the inmate, for life, of the cottage of the enchanted couple.
He could never attain, however, to the innate delicacy of his child, and he would sometimes, with a petulant sigh, intimate at table what a pity it was that she had not married the rich and high-feeding citizen. At such times as these, Maria would gather one of her husband’s feet between her own under the table, and with a squeeze of it that repaid him tenfold for the mortification, would steal a look at him which said, “I possess all which it is possible for me to desire.”