Milan is shining in sunset on those purple fields; and a score of cities
flash back the last red light, which shows each inequality and
undulation of Lombardy outspread four thousand feet beneath. Both
ranges, Alps and Apennines, are clear to view; and all the silvery lakes
are over-canopied and brought into one picture by flame-litten mists.
Monte Rosa lifts her crown of peaks above a belt of clouds into light of
living fire. The Mischabelhoerner and the Dom rest stationary angel-wings
upon the rampart, which at this moment is the wall of heaven. The
pyramid of distant Monte Viso burns like solid amethyst far, far away.
Mont Cervin beckons to his brother, the gigantic Finsteraarhorn, across
tracts of liquid ether. Bells are rising from the villages, now wrapped
in gloom, between me and the glimmering lake. A hush of evening silence
falls upon the ridges, cliffs, and forests of this billowy hill,
ascending into wave-like crests, and toppling with awful chasms over the
dark waters of Lugano. It is good to be alone here at this hour. Yet I
must rise and go--passing through meadows where white lilies sleep in
silvery drifts, and asphodel is pale with spires of faintest rose, and
narcissus dreams of his own beauty, loading the air with fragrance sweet
as some love-music of Mozart. These fields want only the white figure of
Persephone to make them poems; and in this twilight one might fancy that
the queen had left her throne by Pluto's side to mourn for her dead
youth among the flowers uplifted between earth and heaven. Nay, they are
poems now, these fields; with that unchanging background of history,
romance, and human life--the Lombard plain, against whose violet breadth
the blossoms bend their faint heads to the evening air. Downward we
hurry, on pathways where the beeches meet, by silent farms, by meadows
honey-scented, deep in dew. The columbine stands tall and still on those
green slopes of shadowy grass. The nightingale sings now, and now is
hushed again. Streams murmur through the darkness, where the growth of
trees, heavy with honeysuckle and wild rose, is thickest. Fireflies
begin to flit above the growing corn. At last the plain is reached, and
all the skies are tremulous with starlight. Alas, that we should vibrate
so obscurely to these harmonies of earth and heaven! The inner finer
sense of them seems somehow unattainable--that spiritual touch of soul
evoking soul from nature, which should transfigure our dull mood of self
into impersonal delight. Man needs to be a mytho-poet at some moments,
or, better still, to be a mystic steeped through half-unconsciousness in
the vast wonder of the world. Cold and untouched to poetry or piety by
scenes that ought to blend the spirit in ourselves with spirit in the
world without, we can but wonder how this phantom show of mystery and
beauty will pass away from us--how soon--and we be where, see what, use
all our sensibilities on aught or naught?