Chapter IX · LONG JOURNEY. (continued 2)

267Returning to Trieste I passed on to Venice, the beauty of which I learned (rather slowly perhaps), to feel by degrees as I rowed in my gondola from church to church and from gallery to palace. The Austrians were then masters of the city, and it was no doubt German music which I heard for the first time at the church of the Scalzi, very finely performed. It was not seldom in the usual English style of sacred music; (I dare say it was not strictly sacred music at all, perhaps quite a profane opera!) but, in the mood I was in, it seemed to me to have a great sanctity of its own; to be a Week-day Song of Heaven. This was one of the rare occasions in my life in which music has reached the deeper springs in me, and it affected me very much. I suppose as the daffodils did Wordsworth.

Naturally being again in a town and at a good hotel, I resumed better clothes than I had worn in my rough rides, and they were, of course that year, deep mourning with much crape on them. I imagine it must have been this English mourning apparel which provoked among the colour-loving Venetians a strange display of Heteropathy,—that deep-seated animal instinct of hatred and anger against grief and suffering, the exact reverse of sympathy, which causes brutes and birds to gore and peck and slay their diseased and dying companions and brutal men to trample on their weeping, starving wives. I was walking alone rather sadly, bent down over the shells on the beach of the Lido, comparing them in my mind to the old venuses and pectens and beautiful pholases which I used to collect on my father’s long stretch of sandy shore in Ireland,—when suddenly I found myself assailed with a shower of stones. Looking up, I saw a little crowd of women and boys jeering at me and pelting me with whatever they could pick up. Of course they could not really hurt me, but after an effort or two at remonstrance, I was fain to give up my walk 268and return to my gondola and to Venice. Years afterwards, speaking of this incident to Gibson, he told me he had seen at Venice a much worse scene, for the victim was a poor helpless dog which had somehow got into a position from whence it could not escape, and the miserable, hooting, laughing crowd deliberately stoned it to death. The dog looked from one to another of its persecutors as if appealing for mercy and saying, “What have I done to deserve this?” But there was no mercy in those hard hearts.

Ever since I sat on the spot where St. Stephen was stoned, I have felt that that particular form of death must have been one of the most morally trying and dreadful to the sufferer, and the most utterly destructive of the finer instincts in those who inflicted it. If Jews be, as alleged, more prone to cruelty than other nations, the fact seems to me almost explained by the “set of the brains” of a race accustomed to account it a duty to join in stoning an offender to death and watching pitilessly his agonies when mangled, blinded, deafened and bleeding he lies crushed on the ground.

From Venice I travelled very pleasantly in a returning vettura which I was fortunate enough to engage, by Padua and Ferrara over the Apennines to Florence. One day I walked a long way in front during my vetturino’s dinner-hour, and made friends with some poor peasants who welcomed me to their house and to a share of their meal of Polenta and wine. The Polenta was much inferior to Irish oatmeal stirabout or Scotch porridge; and the black wine was like the coarsest vinegar. I tried in vain, out of good manners to drink it. The lives of these poor contadini are obviously in all ways cruelly hard.

Spending one night in a desolate “ramshackle” inn on the road high up on the Apennines, I sat up late writing a description of the place (as “creepy” as I could make it!) to amuse my mother’s dear old servant “Joney,” who 269possessed a volume of Washington Irving’s stories wherein that of the “Inn at Terracina” had served constantly to excite delightful awe in her breast and in my own as a child. I took my letter next day with me to post in Florence, but alas! found there waiting for me one from my brother announcing that our dear old servant was dead. She had never held up her head after I had left Newbridge, and had cease to drop into her cottage for tea.

At Florence I remained many months (or rather on the hill of Bellosguardo above the city) and made some of the most precious friendships of my life; Mrs. Somerville’s first of all, I also had the privilege to know at that time both Mr. and Mrs. Browning, Adolphus Trollope, Walter Savage Landor, Isa Blagden, Miss White (now Madame Villari), and many other very interesting men and women. I shall, however, write a separate chapter combining this and my subsequent visits to Italy.

Late in the summer I travelled with a party through Milan over St. Gothard to Lucerne, and thence to the Pays de Vaud, where I joined a very pleasant couple,—Rev. W. and Mrs. Biedermann,—in taking the Château du Grand Clos, in the Valley of the Rhone; a curious miniature French country house, built some years before by the man who called himself Louis XVII., or Duc de Normandie; and who had collected (as we found) a considerable library of books, all relating to the French Revolution.

From Switzerland I travelled back to England viâ the Rhine with my dear American friends, the Apthorps, who had joined me at Montreux. The perils and fatigues of my eleven months of solitary wanderings were over. I was stronger and more active in body than I had ever been, and so enriched in mind and heart by the things I had seen and the people I had known, that I could afford to smile at the depression and loneliness of my departure.

270As we approached the Black Forest I had a fancy to quit my kind companions for a few days; and leaving them to explore Strasburg, and some other places, I went on to Heidelberg and thence made my way into the beautiful woods. The following lines were written there, September 23rd, 1858:—

ALONE IN THE SCHWARZWALD.

Lord of the Forest Sanctuary! Thou

By the grey fathers of the world in these

Thine own self-fashioned shrines dimly adored,

“All-Father Odin,” “Mover” of the spheres;

Zeus! Brahm! Ormusd! Lord of Light Divine!

God, blessed God! the Good One! Best of names,

By noblest Saxon race found Thee at last,—

O Father! when the slow revolving years

Bring forth the day when men shall see Thy face

Unveiled from superstition’s web of errors old,

Shall they not seek Thee here amid the woods,

Rather than in the pillared aisle, or dome

By loftiest genius reared?

Six months have rolled

Since I stood solitary in the fane

Of desolate Baalbec. The huge walls closed

Round me sublime as when millenniums past

Lost nations worshipped there. I sate beside

The altar stone o’erthrown. For hours I sate

Until the homeward-winging hawk at even

Shrieked when he saw me there, a human form

Where human feet tread once perchance a year,

Then the moon slowly rose above the walls

And then I knelt. It was a glorious fane

All, all my own.

271But not that grand Baalbec,

Nor Parthenon, nor Rome’s stupendous pile,

Nor lovelier Milan, nor the Sepulchre

So dark and solemn where the Christ was laid,

Nor even yet that dreadful field of death

At Ghizeh where the eternal Pyramids

Have, from a world of graves, pointed to Heav’n

For fifty ages past,—not all these shrines

Are holy to my soul as are the woods.

Lo! how God Himself has planned this place

So that all sweet and calm and solemn thoughts

Should have their nests amid the shadowy trees!

How the rude work-day world is all closed out

By the thick curtained foliage, and the sky

Alone revealed, a deep zenith heaven,

Fitly beheld through clasped and upraised arms

Of prayer-like trees. There is no sound more loud

Than the low insect hum, the chirp of birds,

The rustling murmur of embracing boughs,

The gentle dropping of the autumn leaves.

The wood’s sweet breath is incense. From the pines

And larch and chestnut come rich odours pure;

All things are pure and sweet and holy here.

I lie down underneath the firs. The moss

Makes richest cushion for my weary limbs!

Long I gaze upward while the dark green boughs

Moveless project against the azure sky,

Fringed with their russet cones. My satiate eyes

Sink down at length. I turn my cheek to earth.

What may this be, this sense of youth restored,

My happy childhood with its sunbright hours,

Returning once again as in a dream?

’Tis but the odour of the mossy ground,

The “field-smells known in infancy,” when yet,

Our childish sports were near to mother Earth,

Our child-like hearts near to the God in Heaven.

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