The same memory drew us, a few days later, to the spot where Shelley's
body was burned. Viareggio is fast becoming a fashionable
watering-place for the people of Florence and Lucca, who seek fresher
air and simpler living than Livorno offers. It has the usual new inns
and improvised lodging-houses of such places, built on the outskirts of
a little fishing village, with a boundless stretch of noble sands. There
is a wooden pier on which we walked, watching the long roll of waves,
foam-flaked, and quivering with moonlight. The Apennines faded into the
grey sky beyond, and the sea-wind was good to breathe. There is a
feeling of "immensity, liberty, action" here, which is not common in
Italy. It reminds us of England; and to-night the Mediterranean had the
rough force of a tidal sea.
Morning revealed beauty enough in Viareggio to surprise even one who
expects from Italy all forms of loveliness. The sand-dunes stretch for
miles between the sea and a low wood of stone pines, with the Carrara
hills descending from their glittering pinnacles by long lines to the
headlands of the Spezzian Gulf. The immeasurable distance was all
painted in sky-blue and amethyst; then came the golden green of the
dwarf firs; and then dry yellow in the grasses of the dunes; and then
the many-tinted sea, with surf tossed up against the furthest cliffs. It
is a wonderful and tragic view, to which no painter but the Roman Costa
has done justice; and he, it may be said, has made this landscape of the
Carrarese his own. The space between sand and pine-wood was covered with
faint, yellow, evening primroses. They flickered like little harmless
flames in sun and shadow, and the spires of the Carrara range were giant
flames transformed to marble. The memory of that day described by
Trelawny in a passage of immortal English prose, when he and Byron and
Leigh Hunt stood beside the funeral pyre, and libations were poured, and
the _Cor Cordium_ was found inviolate among the ashes, turned all my
thoughts to flame beneath the gentle autumn sky.
Still haunted by these memories, we took the carriage road to Pisa, over
which Shelley's friends had hurried to and fro through those last days.
It passes an immense forest of stone-pines--aisles and avenues;
undergrowth of ilex, laurustinus, gorse, and myrtle; the crowded
cyclamens, the solemn silence of the trees; the winds hushed in their
velvet roof and stationary domes of verdure.