[Sidenote: DAWN OVER THE MOOR]
This morning, waking at dawn, the Padrona was impelled to roll out of
bed, and look out of both her windows. The one over her balcony gives
down the valley and the one opposite her bed affords her vision of the
moor rolling away beyond the Dutch Garden and the terrace corner. If she
had been but a woman of moderate vigour, she would not have gone to bed
again till the whole pageant of mysterious glory had fulfilled itself
before her eyes. For what a sight it was! First of all, the whole
garden, woodland and heather hills were steeped in a translucence for
which there is no name. It is a virgin hour, and its purity no words can
describe. The Ling, in full bloom, was silver and amethyst on the rise,
misty purple and blue in the hollows. Behind the shouldering hills a
rift of sky was a radiant lemon-yellow, a kind of honey sea of light.
And above that, again, little drifts of cloud had caught a wonderful
orange-rose glow like the wings of cherubim about the Throne. Down the
valley there were silver mists against the most tender, clear horizon;
and all along the Lily Walk the clumps of Tiger Lilies seemed to be like
little Fra Angelico angels, holding their breath in adoration!
[Illustration: landscape - two pages wide]
Everything lies, after all, in the point of view. The dawn was decidedly
too pink for safety, and the clumps of Lilies that looked so pious and
recollected have got “the disease” badly in their stalks. Yet realism
can never blight that exquisite hour of breaking day in her thoughts!
The only time we degenerates ever really see the dawn is coming home
from some London ball; or again, travelling. The dawn in London often
gives an impression of extraordinary blue in atmosphere and heaven, we
suppose because it is seen contrasted with artificial illuminations. But
that sapphire blue, when it permeates park and streets, when the sky
seems to hold unplumbed depths beyond depths of the same wonderful
colour, is a thing to dwell in the memory likewise, though travellers
have the better part. Dawn in the Alps! A night not to be depicted! Such
vastness of tinted heights; such black chasms where the pines hang;
spume of waterfalls all golden crimson, and deep rivers, green and
terrible and beautiful with a glint on them as they rush!
One of us ‹the fourth in the lucky clover leaf at Villino Loki; one who
is poet and musician besides many other things, and sometimes poet and
musician together› has defined the indefinable. It is not the dawn of
the day she hymns, but the dawn of the young Spring.
Though the poem is printed in a recently published volume, it seems to
fit naturally into this page.
_THE ST. GOTHARD_
_April and I—
Each with each greeting amid tumbled ice,
Travel these wastes of frozen purity.
Here the wild air above the precipice
E’en tasteth sweet, and hath a delicate scent
As of faint flowers unseen—the flower of snows
Massed peak on peak in slumber yet unspent,
But dreaming of the Rose._
_Here the great hills wear silence as a seal—
April and I,
Listening can hear the loosened snowflake steal
Down from the burdened bough that slips awry;
Here the long cry of water-nymphs at play
Freezes upon the iced lips of fountains,
And their sweet limbs’ arrested holiday
In crystal carved engarlandeth the mountains._
_Through such vast fields of sleep how dare we roam,
April and I,
And from its eyrie bid the torrent foam,
And virgin meads grow starrier than the sky
With scattered cowslip and with drifted bell?
Or where austerely looms an Alpine giant
Set a young almond rosily defiant
To be our sentinel?_
_Whence are we victors, chanting as we go,
April and I.
“Be free, ye tumbling streams, awake O snow—
Ye silver blooms increase and multiply?”
What is our spell?—The singing heart we bring,
And lo! that song that is the core of earth
Leaps in reply, and children of the Spring
Into the light come forth._
[Sidenote: THE DAWN OF YOUNG SPRING]
Then there was a dawn over the Campagna, seen from the train that was
speeding us towards Rome. A ball of red fire hung over the horizon. The
sea lay silver and grey; and misty silver the Campagna.... “God made
himself an awful rose of dawn,” as Tennyson sings. He did that morning:
awful, yet full of a glorious comfort. The sea just caught the great
reflection on its bosom.
A little later, when we came to the first ruins that precede the
aqueducts, there were the white cattle, stepping about among the broken
pillars, with their huge spreading horns all gilded. These had not
changed since the days when the sun gleamed on the grandeurs of classic
Rome. Only then yonder building—temple, or tomb, or villa—fronted the
morning with a forgotten stateliness, a lost grace.
Is anything comparable to the scene that meets the traveller on his
entry into Rome? Alas! St. John Lateran no longer stands like some
titanic splendid ship about to slip her moorings and sail away into the
wild, lonely sea of the Campagna. New walls have sprung up without the
noble ancient walls; sordid disjointed lengths of streets, mean houses
with blistered, leprous plaster; and evil-looking little wine-shops.
Nevertheless, nothing can spoil the moment when the Lateran Church first
gathers shape against the sky. All those statues with tossing gesture
against the faint blue of the new day, heroic figures with outstretched
arms seeming to gather pilgrims into the city; and in the midst of them
the Saviour uplifting the Cross of Salvation! To the believer what a
welcome! And it is Rome herself at a glance, too; for if the Church
stands here beckoning between earth and sky, she is jostled below and
round about by the still speaking wonders of old Pagan Rome.
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