I was at ramble in the lanes, when, from somewhere at a distance, there
sounded the voice of a countryman--strange to say--singing. The notes
were indistinct, but they rose, to my ear, with a moment's musical
sadness, and of a sudden my heart was stricken with a memory so keen that
I knew not whether it was pain or delight. For the sound seemed to me
that of a peasant's song which I once heard whilst sitting among the
ruins of Paestum. The English landscape faded before my eyes. I saw
great Doric columns of honey-golden travertine; between them, as I looked
one way, a deep strip of sea; when I turned, the purple gorges of the
Apennine; and all about the temple, where I sat in solitude, a wilderness
dead and still but for that long note of wailing melody. I had not
thought it possible that here, in my beloved home, where regret and
desire are all but unknown to me, I could have been so deeply troubled by
a thought of things far off. I returned with head bent, that voice
singing in my memory. All the delight I have known in Italian travel
burned again within my heart. The old spell has not lost its power.
Never, I know, will it again draw me away from England; but the Southern
sunlight cannot fade from my imagination, and to dream of its glow upon
the ruins of old time wakes in me the voiceless desire which once was
anguish.
In his _Italienische Reise_, Goethe tells that at one moment of his life
the desire for Italy became to him a scarce endurable suffering; at
length he could not bear to hear or to read of things Italian, even the
sight of a Latin book so tortured him that he turned away from it; and
the day arrived when, in spite of every obstacle, he yielded to the
sickness of longing, and in secret stole away southward. When first I
read that passage, it represented exactly the state of my own mind; to
think of Italy was to feel myself goaded by a longing which, at times,
made me literally ill; I, too, had put aside my Latin books, simply
because I could not endure the torment of imagination they caused me. And
I had so little hope (nay, for years no shadow of reasonable hope) that I
should ever be able to appease my desire. I taught myself to read
Italian; that was something. I worked (half-heartedly) at a colloquial
phrase-book. But my sickness only grew towards despair.
Then came into my hands a sum of money (such a poor little sum) for a
book I had written. It was early autumn. I chanced to hear some one
speak of Naples--and only death would have held me back.