THE CORNICE

It was a dull afternoon in February when we left Nice, and drove

across the mountains to Mentone. Over hill and sea hung a thick mist.

Turbia's Roman tower stood up in cheerless solitude, wreathed round

with driving vapour, and the rocky nest of Esa seemed suspended in

a chaos between sea and sky. Sometimes the fog broke and showed us

Villafranca, lying green and flat in the deep blue below: sometimes a

distant view of higher peaks swam into sight from the shifting cloud.

But the whole scene was desolate. Was it for this that we had left our

English home, and travelled from London day and night? At length we

reached the edge of the cloud, and jingled down by Roccabruna and the

olive-groves, till one by one Mentone's villas came in sight, and at

last we found ourselves at the inn door. That night, and all next day

and the next night, we heard the hoarse sea beat and thunder on the

beach. The rain and wind kept driving from the south, but we consoled

ourselves with thinking that the orange-trees and every kind of flower

were drinking in the moisture and waiting to rejoice in sunlight which

would come.

It was a Sunday morning when we woke and found that the rain had gone,

the sun was shining brightly on the sea, and a clear north wind was

blowing cloud and mist away. Out upon the hills we went, not caring

much what path we took; for everything was beautiful, and hill

and vale were full of garden walks. Through lemon-groves,--pale,

golden-tender trees,--and olives, stretching their grey boughs against

the lonely cottage tiles, we climbed, until we reached the pines and

heath above. Then I knew the meaning of Theocritus for the first time.

We found a well, broad, deep, and clear, with green herbs growing at

the bottom, a runlet flowing from it down the rocky steps, maidenhair,

black adiantum, and blue violets, hanging from the brink and mirrored

in the water. This was just the well in _Hylas_. Theocritus

has been badly treated. They call him a court poet, dead to Nature,

artificial in his pictures. Yet I recognised this fountain by his

verse, just as if he had showed me the very spot. Violets grow

everywhere, of every shade, from black to lilac. Their stalks are

long, and the flowers 'nod' upon them, so that I see how the Greeks

could make them into chaplets--how Lycidas wore his crown of white

violets[5] lying by the fireside elbow-deep in withered asphodel,

watching the chestnuts in the embers, and softly drinking deep healths

to Ageanax far off upon the waves. It is impossible to go wrong in

these valleys. They are cultivated to the height of about five hundred

feet above the sea, in terraces laboriously built up with walls,

earthed and manured, and irrigated by means of tanks and aqueducts.

Above this level, where the virgin soil has not been yet reclaimed,

or where the winds of winter bring down freezing currents from the

mountains through a gap or gully of the lower hills, a tangled growth

of heaths and arbutus, and pines, and rosemarys, and myrtles, continue

the vegetation, till it finally ends in bare grey rocks and peaks some

thousand feet in height. Far above all signs of cultivation on these

arid peaks, you still may see villages and ruined castles, built

centuries ago for a protection from the Moorish pirates. To these

mountain fastnesses the people of the coast retreated when they

descried the sails of their foes on the horizon. In Mentone, not very

long ago, old men might be seen who in their youth were said to have

been taken captive by the Moors; and many Arabic words have found

their way into the patois of the people.

There is something strangely fascinating in the sight of these ruins

on the burning rocks, with their black sentinel cypresses, immensely

tall and far away. Long years and rain and sunlight have made these

castellated eyries one with their native stone. It is hard to trace

in their foundations where Nature's workmanship ends and where man's

begins. What strange sights the mountain villagers must see! The vast

blue plain of the unfurrowed deep, the fairy range of Corsica hung

midway between the sea and sky at dawn or sunset, the stars so close

above their heads, the deep dew-sprinkled valleys, the green pines! On

penetrating into one of these hill-fortresses, you find that it is

a whole village, with a church and castle and piazza, some few feet

square, huddled together on a narrow platform. We met one day three

magnates of Gorbio taking a morning stroll backwards and forwards,

up and down their tiny square. Vehemently gesticulating, loudly

chattering, they talked as though they had not seen each other for ten

years, and were but just unloading their budgets of accumulated news.

Yet these three men probably had lived, eaten, drunk, and talked

together from the cradle to that hour: so true it is that use

and custom quicken all our powers, especially of gossiping and

scandal-mongering. S. Agnese is the highest and most notable of all

these villages. The cold and heat upon its absolutely barren rock

must be alike intolerable. In appearance it is not unlike the Etruscan

towns of Central Italy; but there is something, of course, far more

imposing in the immense antiquity and the historical associations of

a Narni, a Fiesole, a Chiusi, or an Orvieto. Sea-life and rusticity

strike a different note from that of those Apennine-girdled seats of

dead civilisation, in which nations, arts, and religions have gone by

and left but few traces,--some wrecks of giant walls, some excavated

tombs, some shrines, where monks still sing and pray above the relics

of the founders of once world-shaking, now almost forgotten, orders.

Here at Mentone there is none of this; the idyllic is the true note,

and Theocritus is still alive.

We do not often scale these altitudes, but keep along the terraced

glades by the side of olive-shaded streams. The violets, instead of

peeping shyly from hedgerows, fall in ripples and cascades over mossy

walls among maidenhair and spleen-worts. They are very sweet, and the

sound of trickling water seems to mingle with their fragrance in a

most delicious harmony. Sound, smell, and hue make up one chord, the

sense of which is pure and perfect peace. The country-people are

kind, letting us pass everywhere, so that we make our way along their

aqueducts and through their gardens, under laden lemon-boughs, the

pale fruit dangling at our ears, and swinging showers of scented dew

upon us as we pass. Far better, however, than lemon or orange trees,

are the olives. Some of these are immensely old, numbering, it is

said, five centuries, so that Petrarch may almost have rested beneath

their shade on his way to Avignon. These veterans are cavernous with

age: gnarled, split, and twisted trunks, throwing out arms that break

into a hundred branches; every branch distinct, and feathered with

innumerable sparks and spikelets of white, wavy, greenish light.

These are the leaves, and the stems are grey with lichens. The sky and

sea--two blues, one full of sunlight and the other purple--set these

fountains of perennial brightness like gems in lapis-lazuli. At a

distance the same olives look hoary and soft--a veil of woven light

or luminous haze. When the wind blows their branches all one way,

they ripple like a sea of silver. But underneath their covert, in

the shade, grey periwinkles wind among the snowy drift of allium. The

narcissus sends its arrowy fragrance through the air, while, far and

wide, red anemones burn like fire, with interchange of blue and lilac

buds, white arums, orchises, and pink gladiolus. Wandering there, and

seeing the pale flowers, stars white and pink and odorous, we dream

of Olivet, or the grave Garden of the Agony, and the trees seem always

whispering of sacred things. How people can blaspheme against the

olives, and call them imitations of the willow, or complain that they

are shabby shrubs, I do not know.[6]

This shore would stand for Shelley's Island of Epipsychidion, or

the golden age which Empedocles describes, when the mild nations

worshipped Aphrodite with incense and the images of beasts and

yellow honey, and no blood was spilt upon her altars--when 'the trees

flourished with perennial leaves and fruit, and ample crops adorned

their boughs through all the year.' This even now is literally true of

the lemon-groves, which do not cease to flower and ripen. Everything

fits in to complete the reproduction of Greek pastoral life. The goats

eat cytisus and myrtle on the shore; a whole flock gathered round me

as I sat beneath a tuft of golden green euphorbia the other day, and

nibbled bread from my hands. The frog still croaks by tank and

fountain, 'whom the Muses have ordained to sing for aye,' in

spite of Bion's death. The narcissus, anemone, and hyacinth still tell

their tales of love and death. Hesper still gazes on the shepherd

from the mountain-head. The slender cypresses still vibrate, the pines

murmur. Pan sleeps in noontide heat, and goat-herds and wayfaring

men lie down to slumber by the roadside, under olive-boughs in which

cicadas sing. The little villages high up are just as white, the

mountains just as grey and shadowy when evening falls. Nothing is

changed--except ourselves. I expect to find a statue of Priapus or

pastoral Pan, hung with wreaths of flowers--the meal cake, honey, and

spilt wine upon his altar, and young boys and maidens dancing round.

Surely, in some far-off glade, by the side of lemon-grove or garden,

near the village, there must be still a pagan remnant of glad

Nature-worship. Surely I shall chance upon some Thyrsis piping in the

pine-tree shade, or Daphne flying from the arms of Phoebus. So I dream

until I come upon the Calvary set on a solitary hillock, with its

prayer-steps lending a wide prospect across the olives and the

orange-trees, and the broad valleys, to immeasurable skies and purple

seas. There is the iron cross, the wounded heart, the spear, the reed,

the nails, the crown of thorns, the cup of sacrificial blood, the

title, with its superscription royal and divine. The other day we

crossed a brook and entered a lemon-field, rich with blossoms

and carpeted with red anemones. Everything basked in sunlight and

glittered with exceeding brilliancy of hue. A tiny white chapel stood

in a corner of the enclosure. Two iron-grated windows let me

see inside: it was a bare place, containing nothing but a wooden

praying-desk, black and worm-eaten, an altar with its candles and no

flowers, and above the altar a square picture brown with age. On the

floor were scattered several pence, and in a vase above the holy-water

vessel stood some withered hyacinths. As my sight became accustomed to

the gloom, I could see from the darkness of the picture a pale Christ

nailed to the cross with agonising upward eyes and ashy aureole above

the bleeding thorns. Thus I stepped suddenly away from the outward

pomp and bravery of nature to the inward aspirations, agonies,

and martyrdoms of man--from Greek legends of the past to the real

Christian present--and I remembered that an illimitable prospect has

been opened to the world, that in spite of ourselves we must turn our

eyes heavenward, inward, to the infinite unseen beyond us and within

our souls. Nothing can take us back to Phoebus or to Pan. Nothing

can again identify us with the simple natural earth. '_Une immense

espérance a traversé la terre_,' and these chapels, with their deep

significances, lurk in the fair landscape like the cares of real life

among our dreams of art, or like a fear of death and the hereafter in

the midst of opera music. It is a strange contrast. The worship of men

in those old times was symbolised by dances in the evening, banquets,

libations, and mirth-making. 'Euphrosyne' was alike the goddess of

the righteous mind and of the merry heart. Old withered women telling

their rosaries at dusk; belated shepherds crossing themselves beneath

the stars when they pass the chapel; maidens weighed down with

Margaret's anguish of unhappy love; youths vowing their life to

contemplation in secluded cloisters,--these are the human forms which

gather round such chapels; and the motto of the worshippers consists

in this, 'Do often violence to thy desire.' In the Tyrol we have seen

whole villages praying together at daybreak before their day's work,

singing their _Miserere_ and their _Gloria_ and their _Dies Iræ_, to

the sound of crashing organs and jangling bells; appealing in the

midst of Nature's splendour to the Spirit which is above Nature, which

dwells in darkness rather than light, and loves the yearnings and

contentions of our soul more than its summer gladness and peace. Even

the olives here tell more to us of Olivet and the Garden than of the

oil-press and the wrestling-ground. The lilies carry us to the Sermon

on the Mount, and teach humility, instead of summoning up some legend

of a god's love for a mortal. The hillside tanks and running streams,

and water-brooks swollen by sudden rain, speak of Palestine. We call

the white flowers stars of Bethlehem. The large sceptre-reed; the

fig-tree, lingering in barrenness when other trees are full of fruit;

the locust-beans of the Caruba:--for one suggestion of Greek idylls

there is yet another, of far deeper, dearer power.

But who can resist the influence of Greek ideas at the Cap S. Martin?

Down to the verge of the sea stretch the tall, twisted stems of Levant

pines, and on the caverned limestone breaks the deep blue water.

Dazzling as marble are these rocks, pointed and honeycombed with

constant dashing of the restless sea, tufted with corallines and grey

and purple seaweeds in the little pools, but hard and dry and rough

above tide level. Nor does the sea always lap them quietly; for the

last few days it has come tumbling in, roaring and raging on the beach

with huge waves crystalline in their transparency, and maned with

fleecy spray. Such were the rocks and such the swell of breakers when

Ulysses grasped the shore after his long swim. Samphire, very salt and

fragrant, grows in the rocky honeycomb; then lentisk and beach-loving

myrtle, both exceeding green and bushy; then rosemary and euphorbia

above the reach of spray. Fishermen, with their long reeds, sit lazily

perched upon black rocks above blue waves, sunning themselves as much

as seeking sport. One distant tip of snow, seen far away behind the

hills, reminds us of an alien, unremembered winter. While dreaming

there, this fancy came into my head: Polyphemus was born yonder in

the Gorbio Valley. There he fed his sheep and goats, and on the hills

found scanty pasture for his kine. He and his mother lived in the

white house by the cypress near the stream where tulips grow. Young

Galatea, nursed in the caverns of these rocks, white as the foam, and

shy as the sea fishes, came one morning up the valley to pick mountain

hyacinths, and little Polyphemus led the way. He knew where violets

and sweet narcissus grew, as well as Galatea where pink coralline

and spreading sea-flowers with their waving arms. But Galatea, having

filled her lap with bluebells, quite forgot the leaping kids, and

piping Cyclops, and cool summer caves, and yellow honey, and black

ivy, and sweet vine, and water cold as Alpine snow. Down the swift

streamlet she danced laughingly, and made herself once more bitter

with the sea. But Polyphemus remained,--hungry, sad, gazing on the

barren sea, and piping to the mockery of its waves.

Filled with these Greek fancies, it is strange to come upon a little

sandstone dell furrowed by trickling streams and overgrown with

English primroses; or to enter the village of Roccabruna, with its

mediæval castle and the motto on its walls, _Tempora labuntur

tacitisque senescimus annis_. A true motto for the town, where the

butcher comes but once a week, and where men and boys, and dogs, and

palms, and lemon-trees grow up and flourish and decay in the same

hollow of the sunny mountain-side. Into the hard conglomerate of the

hill the town is built; house walls and precipices mortised into one

another, dovetailed by the art of years gone by, and riveted by

age. The same plants grow from both alike--spurge, cistus, rue, and

henbane, constant to the desolation of abandoned dwellings. From the

castle you look down on roofs, brown tiles and chimney-pots, set one

above the other like a big card-castle. Each house has its foot on a

neighbour's neck, and its shoulder set against the native stone. The

streets meander in and out, and up and down, overarched and balconied,

but very clean. They swarm with children, healthy, happy, little

monkeys, who grow fat on salt fish and yellow polenta, with oil and

sun _ad libitum_.

At night from Roccabruna you may see the flaring gas-lamps of the

gaming-house at Monaco, that Armida's garden of the nineteenth

century. It is the sunniest and most sheltered spot of all the coast.

Long ago Lucan said of Monaco, '_Non Corus in illum jus habet aut

Zephyrus_;' winter never comes to nip its tangled cactuses, and

aloes, and geraniums. The air swoons with the scent of lemon-groves;

tall palm-trees wave their graceful branches by the shore; music of

the softest and the loudest swells from the palace; cool corridors

and sunny seats stand ready for the noontide heat or evening calm;

without, are olive-gardens, green and fresh and full of flowers. But

the witch herself holds her high court and never-ending festival of

sin in the painted banquet-halls and among the green tables.

Let us leave this scene and turn with the country-folk of Roccabruna

to S. Michael's Church at Mentone. High above the sea it stands,

and from its open doors you look across the mountains with their

olive-trees. Inside the church is a seething mass of country-folk and

townspeople, mostly women, and these almost all old, but picturesque

beyond description; kerchiefs of every colour, wrinkles of every shape

and depth, skins of every tone of brown and yellow, voices of every

gruffness, shrillness, strength, and weakness. Wherever an empty

corner can be found, it is soon filled by tottering babies and

mischievous children. The country-women come with their large dangling

earrings of thin gold, wearing pink tulips or lemon-buds in their

black hair. A low buzz of gossiping and mutual recognition keeps the

air alive. The whole service seems a holiday--a general enjoyment of

gala dresses and friendly greetings, very different from the

silence, immobility, and _noli me tangere_ aspect of an English

congregation. Over all drones, rattles, snores, and shrieks the organ;

wailing, querulous, asthmatic, incomplete, its everlasting nasal

chant--always beginning, never ending, through a range of two or three

notes ground into one monotony. The voices of the congregation

rise and sink above it. These southern people, like the Arabs, the

Apulians, and the Spaniards, seem to find their music in a hurdy-gurdy

swell of sound. The other day we met a little girl, walking and

spinning, and singing all the while, whose song was just another

version of this chant. It has a discontented plaintive wail, as if it

came from some vast age, and were a cousin of primeval winds.

At first sight, by the side of Mentone, San Remo is sadly prosaic. The

valleys seem to sprawl, and the universal olives are monotonously grey

upon their thick clay soil. Yet the wealth of flowers in the fat

earth is wonderful. One might fancy oneself in a weedy farm flower-bed

invaded by stray oats and beans and cabbages and garlic from the

kitchen-garden. The country does not suggest a single Greek idea.

It has no form or outline--no barren peaks, no spare and difficult

vegetation. The beauty is rich but tame--valleys green with oats and

corn, blossoming cherry-trees, and sweet bean-fields, figs coming into

leaf, and arrowy bay-trees by the side of sparkling streams: here and

there a broken aqueduct or rainbow bridge hung with maidenhair and

briar and clematis and sarsaparilla.

In the cathedral church of San Siro on Good Friday they hang the

columns and the windows with black; they cover the pictures and deface

the altar; above the high altar they raise a crucifix, and below they

place a catafalque with the effigy of the dead Christ. To this sad

symbol they address their prayers and incense, chant their 'litanies

and lurries,' and clash the rattles, which commemorate their rage

against the traitor Judas. So far have we already passed away from the

Greek feeling of Mentone. As I listened to the hideous din, I could

not but remember the Theocritean burial of Adonis. Two funeral beds

prepared: two feasts recurring in the springtime of the year. What a

difference beneath this superficial similarity--[Greek: kalos nekus

oia katheudôn]--_attritus ægrâ macie_. But the fast of Good

Friday is followed by the festival of Easter. That, after all, is the

chief difference.

After leaving the cathedral we saw a pretty picture in a dull old

street of San Remo--three children leaning from a window, blowing

bubbles. The bubbles floated down the street, of every colour, round

and trembling, like the dreams of life which children dream. The town

is certainly most picturesque. It resembles a huge glacier of houses

poured over a wedge of rock, running down the sides and along the

ridge, and spreading itself into a fan between two torrents on the

shore below. House over house, with balcony and staircase, convent

turret and church tower, palm-trees and olives, roof gardens and

clinging creepers--this white cataract of buildings streams downward

from the lazar-house, and sanctuary, and sandstone quarries on the

hill. It is a mass of streets placed close above each other, and

linked together with arms and arches of solid masonry, as a protection

from the earthquakes, which are frequent at San Remo. The walls are

tall, and form a labyrinth of gloomy passages and treacherous blind

alleys, where the Moors of old might meet with a ferocious welcome.

Indeed, San Remo is a fortress as well as a dwelling-place. Over its

gateways may still be traced the pipes for molten lead, and on its

walls the eyeloops for arrows, with brackets for the feet of archers.

Masses of building have been shaken down by earthquakes. The ruins of

what once were houses gape with blackened chimneys and dark forlorn

cellars; mazes of fungus and unhealthy weeds among the still secure

habitations. Hardly a ray of light penetrates the streets; one learns

the meaning of the Italian word _uggia_ from their cold and

gloom. During the day they are deserted by every one but babies and

witchlike old women--some gossiping, some sitting vacant at the house

door, some spinning or weaving, or minding little children--ugly and

ancient as are their own homes, yet clean as are the streets. The

younger population goes afield; the men on mules laden for the hills,

the women burdened like mules with heavy and disgusting loads. It is

an exceptionally good-looking race; tall, well-grown, and strong.--But

to the streets again. The shops in the upper town are few, chiefly

wine-booths and stalls for the sale of salt fish, eggs, and bread,

or cobblers' and tinkers' ware. Notwithstanding the darkness of their

dwellings, the people have a love of flowers; azaleas lean from their

windows, and vines, carefully protected by a sheath of brickwork,

climb the six stories, to blossom out into a pergola upon the roof.

Look at that mass of greenery and colours, dimly seen from beneath,

with a yellow cat sunning herself upon the parapet! To reach such a

garden and such sunlight who would not mount six stories and thread

a labyrinth of passages? I should prefer a room upon the east side of

the town, looking southward to the Molo and the sea, with a sound

of water beneath, and a palm soaring up to fan my window with his

feathery leaves.

The shrines are little spots of brightness in the gloomy streets.

Madonna with a sword; Christ holding His pierced and bleeding heart;

l'Eterno Padre pointing to the dead Son stretched upon His knee; some

souls in torment; S. Roch reminding us of old plagues by the spot upon

his thigh;--these are the symbols of the shrines. Before them stand

rows of pots filled with gillyflowers, placed there by pious, simple,

praying hands--by maidens come to tell their sorrows to our Lady rich

in sorrow, by old women bent and shrivelled, in hopes of paradise or

gratitude for happy days, when Madonna kept Cecchino faithful to his

home, or saved the baby from the fever.

Lower down, between the sea and the hill, is the municipal,

aristocratic, ecclesiastical quarter of San Remo. There stands the

Palace Borea--a truly princely pile, built in the last Renaissance

style of splendour, with sea-nymphs and dolphins, and satyric heads,

half lips, half leafage, round about its doors and windows. Once it

formed the dwelling of a feudal family, but now it is a roomy

anthill of a hundred houses, shops, and offices, the Boreas of to-day

retaining but a portion of one flat, and making profit of the rest.

There, too, are the barracks and the syndic's hall; the Jesuits'

school, crowded with boys and girls; the shops for clothes,

confectionery, and trinkets; the piazza, with its fountain and

tasselled planes, and flowery chestnut-trees, a mass of greenery.

Under these trees the idlers lounge, boys play at leap-frog, men at

bowls. Women in San Remo work all day, but men and boys play for the

most part at bowls or toss-penny or leap-frog or morra. San Siro, the

cathedral, stands at one end of the square. Do not go inside; it has

a sickly smell of immemorial incense and garlic, undefinable and

horrible. Far better looks San Siro from the parapet above the

torrent. There you see its irregular half-Gothic outline across a

tangle of lemon-trees and olives. The stream rushes by through high

walls, covered with creepers, spanned by ferny bridges, feathered by

one or two old tufty palms. And over all rises the ancient turret of

San Siro, like a Spanish giralda, a minaret of pinnacles and pyramids

and dome bubbles, with windows showing heavy bells, old clocks, and

sundials painted on the walls, and a cupola of green and yellow tiles

like serpent-scales, to crown the whole. The sea lies beyond, and

the house-roofs break it with grey horizontal lines. Then there are

convents, legions of them, large white edifices, Jesuitical apparently

for the most part, clanging importunate bells, leaning rose-blossoms

and cypress-boughs over their jealous walls.

Lastly, there is the port--the mole running out into the sea, the quay

planted with plane-trees, and the fishing-boats--by which San Remo is

connected with the naval glory of the past--with the Riviera that gave

birth to Columbus--with the Liguria that the Dorias ruled--with the

great name of Genoa. The port is empty enough now; but from the pier

you look back on San Remo and its circling hills, a jewelled town

set in illimitable olive greyness. The quay seems also to be the

cattle-market. There the small buff cows of North Italy repose after

their long voyage or march, kneeling on the sandy ground or rubbing

their sides against the wooden cross awry with age and shorn of all

its symbols. Lambs frisk among the boats; impudent kids nibble

the drooping ears of patient mules. Hinds in white jackets and

knee-breeches made of skins, lead shaggy rams and fiercely bearded

goats, ready to butt at every barking dog, and always seeking

opportunities of flight. Farmers and parish priests in black

petticoats feel the cattle and dispute about the price, or whet their

bargains with a draught of wine. Meanwhile the nets are brought on

shore glittering with the fry of sardines, which are cooked like

whitebait, with cuttlefish--amorphous objects stretching shiny feelers

on the hot dry sand--and prickly purple eggs of the sea-urchin. Women

go about their labour through the throng, some carrying stones upon

their heads, or unloading boats and bearing planks of wood in single

file, two marching side by side beneath one load of lime, others

scarcely visible under a stack of oats, another with her baby in its

cradle fast asleep.

San Remo has an elder brother among the hills, which is called San

Romolo, after one of the old bishops of Genoa. Who San Remo was is

buried in remote antiquity; but his town has prospered, while of San

Romolo nothing remains but a ruined hill-convent among pine-trees. The

old convent is worth visiting. Its road carries you into the heart of

the sierra which surrounds San Remo, a hill-country something like

the Jura, undulating and green to the very top with maritime pines and

pinasters. Riding up, you hear all manner of Alpine sounds; brawling

streams, tinkling cowbells, and herdsmen calling to each other on the

slopes. Beneath you lies San Remo, scarcely visible; and over it the

great sea rises ever so far into the sky, until the white sails hang

in air, and cloud and sea-line melt into each other indistinguishably.

Spanish chestnuts surround the monastery with bright blue gentians,

hepaticas, forget-me-nots, and primroses about their roots. The house

itself is perched on a knoll with ample prospect to the sea and to

the mountains, very near to heaven, within a theatre of noble

contemplations and soul-stirring thoughts. If Mentone spoke to me of

the poetry of Greek pastoral life, this convent speaks of mediæval

monasticism--of solitude with God, above, beneath, and all around, of

silence and repose from agitating cares, of continuity in prayer, and

changelessness of daily life. Some precepts of the _Imitatio_

came into my mind: 'Be never wholly idle; read or write, pray or

meditate, or work with diligence for the common needs.' 'Praiseworthy

is it for the religious man to go abroad but seldom, and to seem to

shun, and keep his eyes from men.' 'Sweet is the cell when it is often

sought, but if we gad about, it wearies us by its seclusion.' Then I

thought of the monks so living in this solitude; their cell windows

looking across the valley to the sea, through summer and winter, under

sun and stars. Then would they read or write, what long melodious

hours! or would they pray, what stations on the pine-clad hills! or

would they toil, what terraces to build and plant with corn, what

flowers to tend, what cows to milk and pasture, what wood to cut,

what fir-cones to gather for the winter fire! or should they yearn for

silence, silence from their comrades of the solitude, what whispering

galleries of God, where never human voice breaks loudly, but winds

and streams and lonely birds disturb the awful stillness! In such a

hermitage as this, only more wild, lived S. Francis of Assisi, among

the Apennines.[7] It was there that he learned the tongues of beasts

and birds, and preached them sermons. Stretched for hours motionless

on the bare rocks, coloured like them and rough like them in his brown

peasant's serge, he prayed and meditated, saw the vision of Christ

crucified, and planned his order to regenerate a vicious age. So still

he lay, so long, so like a stone, so gentle were his eyes, so kind

and low his voice, that the mice nibbled breadcrumbs from his wallet,

lizards ran over him, and larks sang to him in the air. There, too, in

those long, solitary vigils, the Spirit of God came upon him, and the

spirit of Nature was even as God's Spirit, and he sang: 'Laudato sia

Dio mio Signore, con tutte le creature, specialmente messer lo frate

sole; per suor luna, e per le stelle; per frate vento e per l'aire, e

nuvolo, e sereno e ogni tempo.' Half the value of this hymn would

be lost were we to forget how it was written, in what solitudes and

mountains far from men, or to ticket it with some abstract word

like Pantheism. Pantheism it is not; but an acknowledgment of that

brotherhood, beneath the love of God, by which the sun and moon and

stars, and wind and air and cloud, and clearness and all weather, and

all creatures, are bound together with the soul of man.

Few, of course, were like S. Francis. Probably no monk of San Romolo

was inspired with his enthusiasm for humanity, or had his revelation

of the Divine Spirit inherent in the world. Still fewer can have felt

the æsthetic charm of Nature but most vaguely. It was as much as they

could boast, if they kept steadily to the rule of their order, and

attended to the concerns each of his own soul. A terrible selfishness,

if rightly considered; but one which accorded with the delusion that

this world is a cave of care, the other world a place of torture or

undying bliss, death the prime object of our meditation, and lifelong

abandonment of our fellow-men the highest mode of existence. Why,

then, should monks, so persuaded of the riddle of the earth, have

placed themselves in scenes so beautiful? Why rose the Camaldolis and

Chartreuses over Europe? white convents on the brows of lofty hills,

among the rustling boughs of Vallombrosas, in the grassy meadows of

Engelbergs,--always the eyries of Nature's lovers, men smitten with

the loveliness of earth? There is surely some meaning in these poetic

stations.

Here is a sentence of the _Imitatio_ which throws some light upon

the hymn of S. Francis and the sites of Benedictine monasteries, by

explaining the value of natural beauty for monks who spent their life

in studying death: 'If thy heart were right, then would every creature

be to thee a mirror of life, and a book of holy doctrine. There is no

creature so small and vile that does not show forth the goodness

of God.' With this sentence bound about their foreheads, walked Fra

Angelico and S. Francis. To men like them the mountain valleys and the

skies, and all that they contained, were full of deep significance.

Though they reasoned '_de conditione humanæ miseriæ_,' and '_de

contemptu mundi_,' yet the whole world was a pageant of God's

glory, a testimony to His goodness. Their chastened senses, pure

hearts, and simple wills were as wings by which they soared above the

things of earth, and sent the music of their souls aloft with every

other creature in the symphony of praise. To them, as to Blake, the

sun was no mere blazing disc or ball, but 'an innumerable company

of the heavenly host singing, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God

Almighty."' To them the winds were brothers, and the streams were

sisters--brethren in common dependence upon God their Father, brethren

in common consecration to His service, brethren by blood, brethren by

vows of holiness. Unquestioning faith rendered this world no puzzle;

they overlooked the things of sense because the spiritual things

were ever present, and as clear as day. Yet did they not forget

that spiritual things are symbolised by things of sense; and so the

smallest herb of grass was vital to their tranquil contemplations.

We who have lost sight of the invisible world, who set our affections

more on things of earth, fancy that because these monks despised the

world, and did not write about its landscapes, therefore they were

dead to its beauty. This is mere vanity: the mountains, stars, seas,

fields, and living things were only swallowed up in the one thought of

God, and made subordinate to the awfulness of human destinies. We

to whom hills are hills, and seas are seas, and stars are ponderable

quantities, speak, write, and reason of them as of objects interesting

in themselves. The monks were less ostensibly concerned about such

things, because they only found in them the vestibules and symbols of

a hidden mystery.

The contrast between the Greek and mediæval modes of regarding

Nature is not a little remarkable. Both Greeks and monks, judged by

nineteenth-century standards, were unobservant of natural beauties.

They make but brief and general remarks upon landscapes and the like.

The [Greek: pontiôn te kumatôn anêrithmon gelasma] is very

rare. But the Greeks stopped at the threshold of Nature; the forces

they found there, the gods, were inherent in Nature, and distinct.

They did not, like the monks, place one spiritual power, omnipotent

and omnipresent, above all, and see in Nature lessons of Divine

government. We ourselves having somewhat overstrained the latter point

of view, are now apt to return vaguely to Greek fancies. Perhaps, too,

we talk so much about scenery because it is scenery to us, and the

life has gone out of it.

I cannot leave the Cornice without one word about a place which lies

between Mentone and San Remo. Bordighera has a beauty which is quite

distinct from both. Palms are its chief characteristics. They lean

against the garden walls, and feather the wells outside the town,

where women come with brazen pitchers to draw water. In some of the

marshy tangles of the plain, they spring from a thick undergrowth of

spiky leaves, and rear their tall aërial arms against the deep blue

background of the sea or darker purple of the distant hills. White

pigeons fly about among their branches, and the air is loud with

cooings and with rustlings, and the hoarser croaking of innumerable

frogs. Then, in the olive-groves that stretch along the level shore,

are labyrinths of rare and curious plants, painted tulips and white

periwinkles, flinging their light of blossoms and dark glossy leaves

down the swift channels of the brawling streams. On each side of the

rivulets they grow, like sister cataracts of flowers instead of spray.

At night fresh stars come out along the coast, beneath the stars

of heaven; for you can see the lamps of Ventimiglia and Mentone

and Monaco, and, far away, the lighthouses upon the promontories of

Antibes and the Estrelles. At dawn, a vision of Corsica grows from

the sea. The island lies eighty miles away, but one can trace the

dark strip of irregular peaks glowing amid the gold and purple of the

rising sun. If the air is clear and bright, the snows and overvaulting

clouds which crown its mountains shine all day, and glitter like an

apparition in the bright blue sky. 'Phantom fair,' half raised above

the sea, it stands, as unreal and transparent as the moon when seen in

April sunlight, yet not to be confounded with the shape of any cloud.

If Mentone speaks of Greek legends, and San Romolo restores the

monastic past, we feel ourselves at Bordighera transported to the

East; and lying under its tall palms can fancy ourselves at Tyre or

Daphne, or in the gardens of a Moslem prince.

Note.--Dec. 1873. My old impressions are renewed and confirmed

by a third visit, after seven years, to this coast. For purely

idyllic loveliness, the Cornice is surpassed by nothing in

the South. A very few spots in Sicily, the road between

Castellammare and Amalfi, and the island of Corfu, are its

only rivals in this style of scenery. From Cannes to Sestri is

one continuous line of exquisitely modulated landscape beauty,

which can only be fully appreciated by travellers in carriage

or on foot.

* * * * *

_AJACCIO_

It generally happens that visitors to Ajaccio pass over from the

Cornice coast, leaving Nice at night, and waking about sunrise to find

themselves beneath the frowning mountains of Corsica. The difference

between the scenery of the island and the shores which they have

left is very striking. Instead of the rocky mountains of the Cornice,

intolerably dry and barren at their summits, but covered at their base

with villages and ancient towns and olive-fields, Corsica presents a

scene of solitary and peculiar grandeur. The highest mountain-tops are

covered with snow, and beneath the snow-level to the sea they are

as green as Irish or as English hills, but nearly uninhabited and

uncultivated. Valleys of almost Alpine verdure are succeeded by

tracts of chestnut wood and scattered pines, or deep and flowery

brushwood--the 'maquis' of Corsica, which yields shelter to its

traditional outlaws and bandits. Yet upon these hillsides there

are hardly any signs of life; the whole country seems abandoned to

primeval wildness and the majesty of desolation. Nothing can possibly

be more unlike the smiling Riviera, every square mile of which is

cultivated like a garden, and every valley and bay dotted over with

white villages. After steaming for a few hours along this savage

coast, the rocks which guard the entrance to the bay of Ajaccio,

murderous-looking teeth and needles ominously christened Sanguinari,

are passed, and we enter the splendid land-locked harbour, on the

northern shore of which Ajaccio is built. About three centuries ago

the town, which used to occupy the extreme or eastern end of the bay,

was removed to a more healthy point upon the northern coast, so that

Ajaccio is quite a modern city. Visitors who expect to find in it

the picturesqueness of Genoa or San Remo, or even of Mentone, will

be sadly disappointed. It is simply a healthy, well-appointed town of

recent date, the chief merits of which are, that it has wide streets,

and is free, externally at least, from the filth and rubbish of most

southern seaports.

But if Ajaccio itself is not picturesque, the scenery which

it commands, and in the heart of which it lies, is of the most

magnificent. The bay of Ajaccio resembles a vast Italian lake--a Lago

Maggiore, with greater space between the mountains and the shore.

From the snow-peaks of the interior, huge granite crystals clothed in

white, to the southern extremity of the bay, peak succeeds peak and

ridge rises behind ridge in a line of wonderful variety and beauty.

The atmospheric changes of light and shadow, cloud and colour, on this

upland country, are as subtle and as various as those which lend their

beauty to the scenery of the lakes, while the sea below is blue and

rarely troubled. One could never get tired with looking at this view.

Morning and evening add new charms to its sublimity and beauty. In the

early morning Monte d'Oro sparkles like a Monte Rosa with its fresh

snow, and the whole inferior range puts on the crystal blueness of

dawn among the Alps. In the evening, violet and purple tints and

the golden glow of Italian sunset lend a different lustre to the

fairyland. In fact, the beauties of Switzerland and Italy are

curiously blended in this landscape.

In soil and vegetation the country round Ajaccio differs much from the

Cornice. There are very few olive-trees, nor is the cultivated ground

backed up so immediately by stony mountains; but between the seashore

and the hills there is plenty of space for pasture-land, and orchards

of apricot and peach-trees, and orange gardens. This undulating

champaign, green with meadows and watered with clear streams, is very

refreshing to the eyes of Northern people, who may have wearied of the

bareness and greyness of Nice or Mentone. It is traversed by excellent

roads, recently constructed on a plan of the French Government, which

intersect the country in all directions, and offer an infinite variety

of rides or drives to visitors. The broken granite of which these

roads are made is very pleasant for riding over. Most of the hills

through which they strike, after starting from Ajaccio, are

clothed with a thick brushwood of box, ilex, lentisk, arbutus,

and laurustinus, which stretches down irregularly into vineyards,

olive-gardens, and meadows. It is, indeed, the native growth of the

island; for wherever a piece of ground is left untilled, the macchi

grow up, and the scent of their multitudinous aromatic blossoms is so

strong that it may be smelt miles out at sea. Napoleon, at S. Helena,

referred to this fragrance when he said that he should know Corsica

blindfold by the smell of its soil. Occasional woods of holm oak make

darker patches on the landscape, and a few pines fringe the side of

enclosure walls or towers. The prickly pear runs riot in and out

among the hedges and upon the walls, diversifying the colours of the

landscape with its strange grey-green masses and unwieldy fans. In

spring, when peach and almond trees are in blossom, and when the

roadside is starred with asphodels, this country is most beautiful in

its gladness. The macchi blaze with cistus flowers of red and silver.

Golden broom mixes with the dark purple of the great French lavender,

and over the whole mass of blossom wave plumes of Mediterranean heath

and sweet-scented yellow coronilla. Under the stems of the ilex peep

cyclamens, pink and sweet; the hedgerows are a tangle of vetches,

convolvuluses, lupines, orchises, and alliums, with here and there a

purple iris. It would be difficult to describe all the rare and lovely

plants which are found here in a profusion that surpasses even the

flower-gardens of the Cornice, and reminds one of the most favoured

Alpine valleys in their early spring.

Since the French occupied Corsica they have done much for the island

by improving its harbours and making good roads, and endeavouring

to mitigate the ferocity of the people. But they have many things to

contend against, and Corsica is still behind the other provinces of

France. The people are idle, haughty, umbrageous, fiery, quarrelsome,

fond of gipsy life, and retentive through generations of old feuds and

prejudices to an almost inconceivable extent. Then the nature of the

country itself offers serious obstacles to its proper colonisation

and cultivation. The savage state of the island and its internal feuds

have disposed the Corsicans to quit the seaboard for their mountain

villages and fortresses, so that the great plains at the foot of the

hills are unwholesome for want of tillage and drainage. Again,

the mountains themselves have in many parts been stripped of their

forests, and converted into mere wildernesses of macchi stretching

up and down their slopes for miles and miles of useless desolation.

Another impediment to proper cultivation is found in the old habit of

what is called free pasturage. The highland shepherds are allowed

by the national custom to drive down their flocks and herds to the

lowlands during the winter, so that fences are broken, young crops

are browsed over and trampled down, and agriculture becomes a mere

impossibility. The last and chief difficulty against which the French

have had to contend, and up to this time with apparent success, is

brigandage. The Corsican system of brigandage is so very different

from that of the Italians, Sicilians, and Greeks, that a word may be

said about its peculiar character. In the first place, it has nothing

at all to do with robbery and thieving. The Corsican bandit took to a

free life among the macchi, not for the sake of supporting himself by

lawless depredation, but because he had put himself under a legal and

social ban by murdering some one in obedience to the strict code of

honour of his country. His victim may have been the hereditary foe of

his house for generations, or else the newly made enemy of yesterday.

But in either case, if he had killed him fairly, after a due

notification of his intention to do so, he was held to have fulfilled

a duty rather than to have committed a crime. He then betook himself

to the dense tangles of evergreens which I have described, where he

lived upon the charity of countryfolk and shepherds. In the eyes of

those simple people it was a sacred duty to relieve the necessities of

the outlaws, and to guard them from the bloodhounds of justice. There

was scarcely a respectable family in Corsica who had not one or more

of its members thus _alla campagna_, as it was euphemistically

styled. The Corsicans themselves have attributed this miserable state

of things to two principal causes. The first of these was the ancient

bad government of the island: under its Genoese rulers no justice was

administered, and private vengeance for homicide or insult became a

necessary consequence among the haughty and warlike families of

the mountain villages. Secondly, the Corsicans have been from time

immemorial accustomed to wear arms in everyday life. They used to sit

at their house doors and pace the streets with musket, pistol, dagger,

and cartouch-box on their persons; and on the most trivial occasion

of merriment or enthusiasm they would discharge their firearms. This

habit gave a bloody termination to many quarrels, which might have

ended more peaceably had the parties been unarmed; and so the seeds

of _vendetta_ were constantly being sown. Statistics published

by the French Government present a hideous picture of the state of

bloodshed in Corsica even during this century. In one period of thirty

years (between 1821 and 1850) there were 4319 murders in the island.

Almost every man was watching for his neighbour's life, or seeking how

to save his own; and agriculture and commerce were neglected for this

grisly game of hide-and-seek. In 1853 the French began to take strong

measures, and, under the Prefect Thuillier, they hunted the bandits

from the macchi, killing between 200 and 300 of them. At the same time

an edict was promulgated against bearing arms. It is forbidden to sell

the old Corsican stiletto in the shops, and no one may carry a gun,

even for sporting purposes, unless he obtains a special licence. These

licences, moreover, are only granted for short and precisely measured

periods.

In order to appreciate the stern and gloomy character of the

Corsicans, it is necessary to leave the smiling gardens of Ajaccio,

and to visit some of the more distant mountain villages--Vico, Cavro,

Bastelica, or Bocognano, any of which may easily be reached from the

capital. Immediately after quitting the seaboard, we enter a country

austere in its simplicity, solemn without relief, yet dignified by its

majesty and by the sense of freedom it inspires. As we approach the

mountains, the macchi become taller, feathering man-high above the

road, and stretching far away upon the hills. Gigantic masses of

granite, shaped like buttresses and bastions, seem to guard the

approaches to these hills; while, looking backward over the green

plain, the sea lies smiling in a haze of blue among the rocky horns

and misty headlands of the coast. There is a stateliness about the

abrupt inclination of these granite slopes, rising from their frowning

portals by sharp _arêtes_ to the snows piled on their summits,

which contrasts in a strange way with the softness and beauty of

the mingling sea and plain beneath. In no landscape are more various

qualities combined; in none are they so harmonised as to produce so

strong a sense of majestic freedom and severe power. Suppose that we

are on the road to Corte, and have now reached Bocognano, the first

considerable village since we left Ajaccio. Bocognano might be chosen

as typical of Corsican hill-villages, with its narrow street, and

tall tower-like houses of five or six stories high, faced with

rough granite, and pierced with the smallest windows and very narrow

doorways. These buildings have a mournful and desolate appearance.

There is none of the grandeur of antiquity about them; no sculptured

arms or castellated turrets, or balconies or spacious staircases,

such as are common in the poorest towns of Italy. The signs of warlike

occupation which they offer, and their sinister aspect of vigilance,

are thoroughly prosaic. They seem to suggest a state of society in

which feud and violence were systematised into routine. There is no

relief to the savage austerity of their forbidding aspect; no signs

of wealth or household comfort; no trace of art, no liveliness and

gracefulness of architecture. Perched upon their coigns of vantage,

these villages seem always menacing, as if Saracen pirates, or Genoese

marauders, or bandits bent on vengeance, were still for ever on the

watch. Forests of immensely old chestnut-trees surround Bocognano on

every side, so that you step from the village streets into the shade

of woods that seem to have remained untouched for centuries. The

country-people support themselves almost entirely upon the fruit of

these chestnuts; and there is a large department of Corsica called

Castagniccia, from the prevalence of these trees and the sustenance

which the inhabitants derive from them. Close by the village brawls

a torrent, such as one may see in the Monte Rosa valleys or the

Apennines, but very rarely in Switzerland. It is of a pure green

colour, absolutely like Indian jade, foaming round the granite

boulders, and gliding over smooth slabs of polished stone, and eddying

into still, deep pools fringed with fern. Monte d'Oro, one of the

largest mountains of Corsica, soars above, and from his snows the

purest water, undefiled by glacier mud or the _débris_ of

avalanches, melts away. Following the stream, we rise through the

macchi and the chestnut woods, which grow more sparely by degrees,

until we reach the zone of beeches. Here the scene seems suddenly

transferred to the Pyrenees; for the road is carried along abrupt

slopes, thickly set with gigantic beech-trees, overgrown with pink and

silver lichens. In the early spring their last year's leaves are still

crisp with hoar-frost; one morning's journey has brought us from the

summer of Ajaccio to winter on these heights, where no flowers are

visible but the pale hellebore and tiny lilac crocuses. Snow-drifts

stretch by the roadside, and one by one the pioneers of the vast

pine-woods of the interior appear. A great portion of the pine-forest

(_Pinus larix_, or Corsican pine, not larch) between Bocognano

and Corte had recently been burned by accident when we passed by.

Nothing could be more forlorn than the black leafless stems and

branches emerging from the snow. Some of these trees were mast-high,

and some mere saplings. Corte itself is built among the mountain

fastnesses of the interior. The snows and granite cliffs of Monte

Rotondo overhang it to the north-west, while two fair valleys lead

downward from its eyrie to the eastern coast. The rock on which it

stands rises to a sharp point, sloping southward, and commanding the

valleys of the Golo and the Tavignano. Remembering that Corte was the

old capital of Corsica, and the centre of General Paoli's government,

we are led to compare the town with Innsprück, Meran, or Grenoble.

In point of scenery and situation it is hardly second to any of these

mountain-girdled cities; but its poverty and bareness are scarcely

less striking than those of Bocognano.

The whole Corsican character, with its stern love of justice, its

furious revengefulness and wild passion for freedom, seems to be

illustrated by the peculiar elements of grandeur and desolation in

this landscape. When we traverse the forest of Vico or the rocky

pasture-lands of Niolo, the history of the Corsican national heroes,

Giudice della Rocca and Sampiero, becomes intelligible, nor do we fail

to understand some of the mysterious attraction which led the more

daring spirits of the island to prefer a free life among the macchi

and pine-woods to placid lawful occupations in farms and villages.

The lives of the two men whom I have mentioned are so prominent in

Corsican history, and are so often still upon the lips of the common

people, that it may be well to sketch their outlines in the foreground

of the Salvator Rosa landscape just described. Giudice was the

governor of Corsica, as lieutenant for the Pisans, at the end of the

thirteenth century. At that time the island belonged to the republic

of Pisa, but the Genoese were encroaching on them by land and sea,

and the whole life of their brave champion was spent in a desperate

struggle with the invaders, until at last he died, old, blind, and in

prison, at the command of his savage foes. Giudice was the title which

the Pisans usually conferred upon their governor, and Della Rocca

deserved it by right of his own inexorable love of justice. Indeed,

justice seems to have been with him a passion, swallowing up all other

feelings of his nature. All the stories which are told of him turn

upon this point in his character; and though they may not be strictly

true, they illustrate the stern virtues for which he was celebrated

among the Corsicans, and show what kind of men this harsh and gloomy

nation loved to celebrate as heroes. This is not the place either to

criticise these legends or to recount them at full length. The most

famous and the most characteristic may, however, be briefly told. On

one occasion, after a victory over the Genoese, he sent a message

that the captives in his hands should be released if their wives and

sisters came to sue for them. The Genoese ladies embarked, and

arrived in Corsica, and to Giudice's nephew was intrusted the duty

of fulfilling his uncle's promise. In the course of executing his

commission, the youth was so smitten with the beauty of one of the

women that he dishonoured her. Thereupon Giudice had him at once put

to death. Another story shows the Spartan justice of this hero in

a less savage light. He was passing by a cowherd's cottage, when he

heard some young calves bleating. On inquiring what distressed them,

he was told that the calves had not enough milk to drink after the

farm people had been served. Then Giudice made it a law that the

calves throughout the land should take their fill before the cows were

milked.

Sampiero belongs to a later period of Corsican history. After a long

course of misgovernment the Genoese rule had become unbearable. There

was no pretence of administering justice, and private vengeance had

full sway in the island. The sufferings of the nation were so great

that the time had come for a new judge or saviour to rise among them.

Sampiero was the son of obscure parents who lived at Bastelica. But

his abilities very soon declared themselves, and made a way for him in

the world. He spent his youth in the armies of the Medici and of the

French Francis, gaining great renown as a brave soldier. Bayard became

his friend, and Francis made him captain of his Corsican bands. But

Sampiero did not forget the wrongs of his native land while thus on

foreign service. He resolved, if possible, to undermine the power

of Genoa, and spent the whole of his manhood and old age in one

long struggle with their great captain, Stephen Doria. Of his stern

patriotism and Roman severity of virtue the following story is a

terrible illustration. Sampiero, though a man of mean birth, had

married an heiress of the noble Corsican house of the Ornani. His

wife, Vannina, was a woman of timid and flexible nature, who, though

devoted to her husband, fell into the snares of his enemies. During

his absence on an embassy to Algiers the Genoese induced her to leave

her home at Marseilles and to seek refuge in their city, persuading

her that this step would secure the safety of her child. She was

starting on her journey when a friend of Sampiero arrested her, and

brought her back to Aix, in Provence. Sampiero, when he heard of these

events, hurried to France, and was received by a relative of his,

who hinted that he had known of Vannina's projected flight. 'E tu hai

taciuto?' was Sampiero's only answer, accompanied by a stroke of his

poignard that killed the lukewarm cousin. Sampiero now brought his

wife from Aix to Marseilles, preserving the most absolute silence on

the way, and there, on entering his house, he killed her with his own

hand. It is said that he loved Vannina passionately; and when she was

dead, he caused her to be buried with magnificence in the church of S.

Francis. Like Giudice, Sampiero fell at last a prey to treachery. The

murder of Vannina had made the Ornani his deadly foes. In order to

avenge her blood, they played into the hands of the Genoese, and laid

a plot by which the noblest of the Corsicans was brought to death.

First, they gained over to their scheme a monk of Bastelica, called

Ambrogio, and Sampiero's own squire and shield-bearer, Vittolo. By

means of these men, in whom he trusted, he was drawn defenceless and

unattended into a deeply wooded ravine near Cavro, not very far from

his birthplace, where the Ornani and their Genoese troops surrounded

him. Sampiero fired his pistols in vain, for Vittolo had loaded them

with the shot downwards. Then he drew his sword, and began to lay

about him, when the same Vittolo, the Judas, stabbed him from

behind, and the old lion fell dead by his friend's hand. Sampiero was

sixty-nine when he died, in the year 1567. It is satisfactory to know

that the Corsicans have called traitors and foes to their country

Vittoli for ever. These two examples of Corsican patriots are enough;

we need not add to theirs the history of Paoli--a milder and more

humane, but scarcely less heroic leader. Paoli, however, in the

hour of Corsica's extremest peril, retired to England, and died in

philosophic exile. Neither Giudice nor Sampiero would have acted thus.

The more forlorn the hope, the more they struggled.

Among the old Corsican customs which are fast dying out, but

which still linger in the remote valleys of Niolo and Vico, is the

_vócero_, or funeral chant, improvised by women at funerals over

the bodies of the dead. Nothing illustrates the ferocious temper and

savage passions of the race better than these _vóceri_, many of

which have been written down and preserved. Most of them are songs

of vengeance and imprecation, mingled with hyperbolical laments and

utterances of extravagant grief, poured forth by wives and sisters at

the side of murdered husbands and brothers. The women who sing them

seem to have lost all milk of human kindness, and to have exchanged

the virtues of their sex for Spartan fortitude and the rage of furies.

While we read their turbid lines we are carried in imagination to one

of the cheerless houses of Bastelica or Bocognano, overshadowed by its

mournful chestnut-tree, on which the blood of the murdered man is yet

red. The _gridata_, or wake, is assembled in a dark room. On the

wooden board, called _tola_, the corpse lies stretched; and round

it are women, veiled in the blue-black mantle of Corsican costume,

moaning and rocking themselves upon their chairs. The _pasto_ or

_conforto_, food supplied for mourners, stands upon a side table,

and round the room are men with savage eyes and bristling beards,

armed to the teeth, keen for vengeance. The dead man's musket and

pocket-pistol lie beside him, and his bloody shirt is hung up at his

head. Suddenly, the silence, hitherto only disturbed by suppressed

groans and muttered curses, is broken by a sharp cry. A woman rises:

it is the sister of the dead man; she seizes his shirt, and holding

it aloft with Mænad gestures and frantic screams, gives rhythmic

utterance to her grief and rage. 'I was spinning, when I heard a great

noise: it was a gunshot, which went into my heart, and seemed a voice

that cried, "Run, thy brother is dying." I ran into the room above;

I took the blow into my breast; I said, "Now he is dead, there is

nothing to give me comfort. Who will undertake thy vengeance? When I

show thy shirt, who will vow to let his beard grow till the murderer

is slain? Who is there left to do it? A mother near her death? A

sister? Of all our race there is only left a woman, without kin, poor,

orphan, and a girl. Yet, O my brother! never fear. For thy vengeance

thy sister is enough!

'"Ma per fà la to bindetta,

Sta siguru, basta anch ella!

Give me the pistol; I will shoulder the gun; I will away to the

hills. My brother, heart of thy sister, thou shalt be avenged!"' A

_vócero_ declaimed upon the bier of Giammatteo and Pasquale,

two cousins, by the sister of the former, is still fiercer and more

energetic in its malediction. This Erinnys of revenge prays Christ and

all the saints to extirpate the murderer's whole race, to shrivel it

up till it passes from the earth. Then, with a sudden and vehement

transition to the pathos of her own sorrow, she exclaims:--

'Halla mai bista nissunu

Tumbà l'omi pe li canti?'

It appears from these words that Giammatteo's enemies had killed him

because they were jealous of his skill in singing. Shortly after,

she curses the curate of the village, a kinsman of the murderer, for

refusing to toll the funeral bells; and at last, all other threads of

rage and sorrow being twined and knotted into one, she gives loose

to her raging thirst for blood: 'If only I had a son, to train like

a sleuth-hound, that he might track the murderer! Oh, if I had a son!

Oh, if I had a lad!' Her words seem to choke her, and she swoons, and

remains for a short time insensible. When the Bacchante of revenge

awakes, it is with milder feelings in her heart: 'O brother mine,

Matteo! art thou sleeping? Here I will rest with thee and weep till

daybreak.' It is rare to find in literature so crude and intense

an expression of fiery hatred as these untranslatable _vóceri_

present. The emotion is so simple and so strong that it becomes

sublime by mere force, and affects us with a strange pathos when

contrasted with the tender affection conveyed in such terms of

endearment as 'my dove,' 'my flower,' 'my pheasant,' 'my bright

painted orange,' addressed to the dead. In the _vóceri_ it often

happens that there are several interlocutors: one friend questions and

another answers; or a kinswoman of the murderer attempts to justify

the deed, and is overwhelmed with deadly imprecations. Passionate

appeals are made to the corpse: 'Arise! Do you not hear the women cry?

Stand up. Show your wounds, and let the fountains of your blood flow!

Alas! he is dead; he sleeps; he cannot hear!' Then they turn again to

tears and curses, feeling that no help or comfort can come from the

clay-cold form. The intensity of grief finds strange language for its

utterance. A girl, mourning over her father, cries:--

'Mi l'hannu crucifissatu

Cume Ghiesu Cristu in croce.'

Once only, in Viale's collection, does any friend of the dead remember

mercy. It is an old woman, who points to the crucifix above the bier.

But all the _vóceri_ are not so murderous. Several are composed

for girls who died unwedded and before their time, by their mothers

or companions. The language of these laments is far more tender and

ornate. They praise the gentle virtues and beauty of the girl, her

piety and helpful household ways. The most affecting of these dirges

is that which celebrates the death of Romana, daughter of Dariola

Danesi. Here is a pretty picture of the girl: 'Among the best and

fairest maidens you were like a rose among flowers, like the moon

among stars; so far more lovely were you than the loveliest. The

youths in your presence were like lighted torches, but full of

reverence; you were courteous to all, but with none familiar. In

church they gazed at you, but you looked at none of them; and after

mass you said, "Mother, let us go." Oh! who will console me for your

loss? Why did the Lord so much desire you? But now you rest in heaven,

all joy and smiles; for the world was not worthy of so fair a face.

Oh, how far more beautiful will Paradise be now!' Then follows a

piteous picture of the old bereaved mother, to whom a year will seem

a thousand years, who will wander among relatives without affection,

neighbours without love; and who, when sickness comes, will have no

one to give her a drop of water, or to wipe the sweat from her brow,

or to hold her hand in death. Yet all that is left for her is to wait

and pray for the end, that she may join again her darling.

But it is time to return to Ajaccio itself. At present the attractions

and ornaments of the town consist of a good public library, Cardinal

Fesch's large but indifferent collection of pictures, two monuments

erected to Napoleon, and Napoleon's house. It will always be the chief

pride of Ajaccio that she gave birth to the great emperor. Close to

the harbour, in a public square by the sea-beach, stands an equestrian

statue of the conqueror, surrounded by his four brothers on foot. They

are all attired in Roman fashion, and are turned seaward, to the west,

as if to symbolise the emigration of this family to subdue Europe.

There is something ludicrous and forlorn in the stiffness of the

group--something even pathetic, when we think how Napoleon gazed

seaward from another island, no longer on horseback, no longer

laurel-crowned, an unthroned, unseated conqueror, on S. Helena. His

father's house stands close by. An old Italian waiting-woman, who had

been long in the service of the Murats, keeps it and shows it. She

has the manners of a lady, and can tell many stories of the various

members of the Buonaparte family. Those who fancy that Napoleon was

born in a mean dwelling of poor parents will be surprised to find so

much space and elegance in these apartments. Of course his family was

not rich by comparison with the riches of French or English nobles.

But for Corsicans they were well-to-do, and their house has an air of

antique dignity. The chairs of the entrance-saloon have been literally

stripped of their coverings by enthusiastic visitors; the horse-hair

stuffing underneath protrudes itself with a sort of comic pride, as

if protesting that it came to be so tattered in an honourable service.

Some of the furniture seems new; but many old presses, inlaid with

marbles, agates, and lapis-lazuli, such as Italian families preserve

for generations, have an air of respectable antiquity about them. Nor

is there any doubt that the young Napoleon led his minuets beneath

the stiff girandoles of the formal dancing-room. There, too, in a

dark back chamber, is the bed in which he was born. At its foot is a

photograph of the Prince Imperial sent by the Empress Eugénie, who,

when she visited the room, wept much _pianse molto_ (to use the

old lady's phrase)--at seeing the place where such lofty destinies

began. On the wall of the same room is a portrait of Napoleon himself

as the young general of the republic--with the citizen's unkempt

hair, the fierce fire of the Revolution in his eyes, a frown upon his

forehead, lips compressed, and quivering nostrils; also one of his

mother, the pastille of a handsome woman, with Napoleonic eyes

and brows and nose, but with a vacant simpering mouth. Perhaps

the provincial artist knew not how to seize the expression of this

feature, the most difficult to draw. For we cannot fancy that Letizia

had lips without the firmness or the fulness of a majestic nature.

The whole first story of this house belonged to the Buonaparte family.

The windows look out partly on a little court and partly on narrow

streets. It was, no doubt, the memory of this home that made Napoleon,

when emperor, design schemes for the good of Corsica--schemes that

might have brought him more honour than many conquests, but which

he had no time or leisure to carry out. On S. Helena his mind often

reverted to them, and he would speak of the gummy odours of the macchi

wafted from the hillsides to the seashore.

* * * * *

_MONTE GENEROSO_

The long hot days of Italian summer were settling down on plain and

country when, in the last week of May, we travelled northward from

Florence and Bologna seeking coolness. That was very hard to find in

Lombardy. The days were long and sultry, the nights short, without a

respite from the heat. Milan seemed a furnace, though in the Duomo and

the narrow shady streets there was a twilight darkness which at least

looked cool. Long may it be before the northern spirit of improvement

has taught the Italians to despise the wisdom of their forefathers,

who built those sombre streets of palaces with overhanging eaves,

that, almost meeting, form a shelter from the fiercest sun. The lake

country was even worse than the towns; the sunlight lay all day asleep

upon the shining waters, and no breeze came to stir their surface or

to lift the tepid veil of haze, through which the stony mountains,

with their yet unmelted patches of winter snow, glared as if in

mockery of coolness.

Then we heard of a new inn, which had just been built by an

enterprising Italian doctor below the very top of Monte Generoso.

There was a picture of it in the hotel at Cadenabbia, but this gave

but little idea of any particular beauty. A big square house,

with many windows, and the usual ladies on mules, and guides with

alpenstocks, advancing towards it, and some round bushes growing near,

was all it showed. Yet there hung the real Monte Generoso above our

heads, and we thought it must be cooler on its height than by the

lake-shore. To find coolness was the great point with us just then.

Moreover, some one talked of the wonderful plants that grew among its

rocks, and of its grassy slopes enamelled with such flowers as make

our cottage gardens at home gay in summer, not to speak of others

rarer and peculiar to the region of the Southern Alps. Indeed, the

Generoso has a name for flowers, and it deserves it, as we presently

found.

This mountain is fitted by its position for commanding one of the

finest views in the whole range of the Lombard Alps. A glance at the

map shows that. Standing out pre-eminent among the chain of lower

hills to which it belongs, the lakes of Lugano and Como with their

long arms enclose it on three sides, while on the fourth the plain of

Lombardy with its many cities, its rich pasture-lands and cornfields

intersected by winding river-courses and straight interminable

roads, advances to its very foot. No place could be better chosen for

surveying that contrasted scene of plain and mountain, which forms

the great attraction of the outlying buttresses of the central Alpine

mass. The superiority of the Monte Generoso to any of the similar

eminences on the northern outskirts of Switzerland is great. In

richness of colour, in picturesqueness of suggestion, in sublimity and

breadth of prospect, its advantages are incontestable. The reasons for

this superiority are obvious. On the Italian side the transition from

mountain to plain is far more abrupt; the atmosphere being clearer,

a larger sweep of distance is within our vision; again, the sunlight

blazes all day long upon the very front and forehead of the distant

Alpine chain, instead of merely slanting along it, as it does upon the

northern side.

From Mendrisio, the village at the foot of the mountain, an easy

mule-path leads to the hotel, winding first through English-looking

hollow lanes with real hedges, which are rare in this country,

and English primroses beneath them. Then comes a forest region of

luxuriant chestnut-trees, giants with pink boles just bursting into

late leafage, yellow and tender, but too thin as yet for shade.

A little higher up, the chestnuts are displaced by wild laburnums

bending under their weight of flowers. The graceful branches meet

above our heads, sweeping their long tassels against our faces as we

ride beneath them, while the air for a good mile is full of fragrance.

It is strange to be reminded in this blooming labyrinth of the dusty

suburb roads and villa gardens of London. The laburnum is pleasant

enough in S. John's Wood or the Regent's Park in May--a tame

domesticated thing of brightness amid smoke and dust. But it is

another joy to see it flourishing in its own home, clothing acres of

the mountain-side in a very splendour of spring-colour, mingling its

paler blossoms with the golden broom of our own hills, and with

the silver of the hawthorn and wild cherry. Deep beds of

lilies-of-the-valley grow everywhere beneath the trees; and in the

meadows purple columbines, white asphodels, the Alpine spiræa, tall,

with feathery leaves, blue scabious, golden hawkweeds, turkscap

lilies, and, better than all, the exquisite narcissus poeticus, with

its crimson-tipped cup, and the pure pale lilies of San Bruno, are

crowded in a maze of dazzling brightness. Higher up the laburnums

disappear, and flaunting crimson peonies gleam here and there upon

the rocks, until at length the gentians and white ranunculuses of the

higher Alps displace the less hardy flowers of Italy.

About an hour below the summit of the mountain we came upon the inn,

a large clean building, with scanty furniture and snowy wooden floors,

guiltless of carpets. It is big enough to hold about a hundred guests;

and Doctor Pasta, who built it, a native of Mendrisio, was gifted

either with much faith or with a real prophetic instinct.[8] Anyhow he

deserves commendation for his spirit of enterprise. As yet the house

is little known to English travellers: it is mostly frequented by

Italians from Milan, Novara, and other cities of the plain, who call

it the Italian Righi, and come to it, as cockneys go to Richmond,

for noisy picnic excursions, or at most for a few weeks'

_villeggiatura_ in the summer heats. When we were there in May

the season had scarcely begun, and the only inmates besides ourselves

were a large party from Milan, ladies and gentlemen in holiday guise,

who came, stayed one night, climbed the peak at sunrise, and departed

amid jokes and shouting and half-childish play, very unlike the doings

of a similar party in sober England. After that the stillness of

nature descended on the mountain, and the sun shone day after day upon

that great view which seemed created only for ourselves. And what

a view it was! The plain stretching up to the high horizon, where a

misty range of pink cirrus-clouds alone marked the line where earth

ended and the sky began, was islanded with cities and villages

innumerable, basking in the hazy shimmering heat. Milan, seen through

the doctor's telescope, displayed its Duomo perfect as a microscopic

shell, with all its exquisite fretwork, and Napoleon's arch of triumph

surmounted by the four tiny horses, as in a fairy's dream. Far off,

long silver lines marked the lazy course of Po and Ticino, while

little lakes like Varese and the lower end of Maggiore spread

themselves out, connecting the mountains with the plain. Five minutes'

walk from the hotel brought us to a ridge where the precipice fell

suddenly and almost sheer over one arm of Lugano Lake. Sullenly

outstretched asleep it lay beneath us, coloured with the tints of

fluor-spar, or with the changeful green and azure of a peacock's

breast. The depth appeared immeasurable. San Salvadore had receded

into insignificance: the houses and churches and villas of Lugano

bordered the lake-shore with an uneven line of whiteness. And over all

there rested a blue mist of twilight and of haze, contrasting with the

clearness of the peaks above. It was sunset when we first came here;

and, wave beyond wave, the purple Italian hills tossed their crested

summits to the foot of a range of stormy clouds that shrouded the high

Alps. Behind the clouds was sunset, clear and golden; but the

mountains had put on their mantle for the night, and the hem of their

garment was all we were to see. And yet--over the edge of the topmost

ridge of cloud, what was that long hard line of black, too solid and

immovable for cloud, rising into four sharp needles clear and well

defined? Surely it must be the familiar outline of Monte Rosa itself,

the form which every one who loves the Alps knows well by heart, which

picture-lovers know from Ruskin's woodcut in the 'Modern Painters.'

For a moment only the vision stayed: then clouds swept over it again,

and from the place where the empress of the Alps had been, a pillar of

mist shaped like an angel's wing, purple and tipped with gold, shot up

against the pale green sky. That cloud-world was a pageant in itself,

as grand and more gorgeous perhaps than the mountains would have been.

Deep down through the hollows of the Simplon a thunderstorm was

driving; and we saw forked flashes once and again, as in a distant

world, lighting up the valleys for a moment, and leaving the darkness

blacker behind them as the storm blurred out the landscape forty miles

away. Darkness was coming to us too, though our sky was clear and the

stars were shining brightly. At our feet the earth was folding itself

to sleep; the plain was wholly lost; little islands of white mist had

formed themselves, and settled down upon the lakes and on their marshy

estuaries; the birds were hushed; the gentian-cups were filling to the

brim with dew. Night had descended on the mountain and the plain; the

show was over.

The dawn was whitening in the east next morning, when we again

scrambled through the dwarf beechwood to the precipice above the lake.

Like an ink-blot it lay, unruffled, slumbering sadly. Broad sheets of

vapour brooded on the plain, telling of miasma and fever, of which we

on the mountain, in the pure cool air, knew nothing. The Alps were

all there now--cold, unreal, stretching like a phantom line of snowy

peaks, from the sharp pyramids of Monte Viso and the Grivola in the

west to the distant Bernina and the Ortler in the east. Supreme among

them towered Monte Rosa--queenly, triumphant, gazing down in proud

pre-eminence, as she does when seen from any point of the Italian

plain. There is no mountain like her. Mont Blanc himself is scarcely

so regal; and she seems to know it, for even the clouds sweep humbled

round her base, girdling her at most, but leaving her crown clear and

free. Now, however, there were no clouds to be seen in all the sky.

The mountains had a strange unshriven look, as if waiting to be

blessed. Above them, in the cold grey air, hung a low black arch

of shadow, the shadow of the bulk of the huge earth, which still

concealed the sun. Slowly, slowly this dark line sank lower, till,

one by one, at last, the peaks caught first a pale pink flush; then

a sudden golden glory flashed from one to the other, as they leapt

joyfully into life. It is a supreme moment this first burst of life

and light over the sleeping world, as one can only see it on rare days

and in rare places like the Monte Generoso. The earth--enough of it at

least for us to picture to ourselves the whole--lies at our feet; and

we feel as the Saviour might have felt, when from the top of that

high mountain He beheld the kingdoms of the world and all the glory of

them. Strangely and solemnly may we image to our fancy the lives that

are being lived down in those cities of the plain: how many are waking

at this very moment to toil and a painful weariness, to sorrow, or to

'that unrest which men miscall delight;' while we upon our mountain

buttress, suspended in mid-heaven and for a while removed from daily

cares, are drinking in the beauty of the world that God has made so

fair and wonderful. From this same eyrie, only a few years ago, the

hostile armies of France, Italy, and Austria might have been watched

moving in dim masses across the plains, for the possession of which

they were to clash in mortal fight at Solferino and Magenta. All is

peaceful now. It is hard to picture the waving cornfields trodden

down, the burning villages and ransacked vineyards, all the horrors of

real war to which that fertile plain has been so often the prey. But

now these memories of

Old, unhappy, far-off things,

And battles long ago,

do but add a calm and beauty to the radiant scene that lies before us.

And the thoughts which it suggests, the images with which it stores

our mind, are not without their noblest uses. The glory of the world

sinks deeper into our shallow souls than we well know; and the spirit

of its splendour is always ready to revisit us on dark and dreary days

at home with an unspeakable refreshment. Even as I write, I seem to

see the golden glow sweeping in broad waves over the purple hills

nearer and nearer, till the lake brightens at our feet, and the

windows of Lugano flash with sunlight, and little boats creep forth

across the water like spiders on a pond, leaving an arrowy track of

light upon the green behind them, while Monte Salvadore with its tiny

chapel and a patch of the further landscape are still kept in darkness

by the shadow of the Generoso itself. The birds wake into song as the

sun's light comes; cuckoo answers cuckoo from ridge to ridge; dogs

bark; and even the sounds of human life rise up to us: children's

voices and the murmurs of the market-place ascending faintly from the

many villages hidden among the chestnut-trees beneath our feet; while

the creaking of a cart we can but just see slowly crawling along the

straight road by the lake, is heard at intervals.

The full beauty of the sunrise is but brief. Already the low lakelike

mists we saw last night have risen and spread, and shaken themselves

out into masses of summer clouds, which, floating upward, threaten to

envelop us upon our vantage-ground. Meanwhile they form a changeful

sea below, blotting out the plain, surging up into the valleys with

the movement of a billowy tide, attacking the lower heights like the

advance-guard of a besieging army, but daring not as yet to invade the

cold and solemn solitudes of the snowy Alps. These, too, in time, when

the sun's heat has grown strongest, will be folded in their midday

pall of sheltering vapour.

The very summit of Monte Generoso must not be left without a word of

notice. The path to it is as easy as the sheep-walks on an English

down, though cut along grass-slopes descending at a perilously sharp

angle. At the top the view is much the same, as far as the grand

features go, as that which is commanded from the cliff by the hotel.

But the rocks here are crowded with rare Alpine flowers--delicate

golden auriculas with powdery leaves and stems, pale yellow cowslips,

imperial purple saxifrages, soldanellas at the edge of lingering

patches of the winter snow, blue gentians, crocuses, and the frail,

rosy-tipped ranunculus, called glacialis. Their blooming time is

brief. When summer comes the mountain will be bare and burned, like

all Italian hills. The Generoso is a very dry mountain, silent and

solemn from its want of streams. There is no sound of falling waters

on its crags; no musical rivulets flow down its sides, led carefully

along the slopes, as in Switzerland, by the peasants, to keep their

hay-crops green and gladden the thirsty turf throughout the heat

and drought of summer. The soil is a Jurassic limestone: the rain

penetrates the porous rock, and sinks through cracks and fissures, to

reappear above the base of the mountain in a full-grown stream. This

is a defect in the Generoso, as much to be regretted as the want of

shade upon its higher pastures. Here, as elsewhere in Piedmont, the

forests are cut for charcoal; the beech-scrub, which covers large

tracts of the hills, never having the chance of growing into trees

much higher than a man. It is this which makes an Italian mountain

at a distance look woolly, like a sheep's back. Among the brushwood,

however, lilies-of-the-valley and Solomon's seals delight to grow;

and the league-long beds of wild strawberries prove that when the

laburnums have faded, the mountain will become a garden of feasting.

It was on the crest of Monte Generoso, late one afternoon in May, that

we saw a sight of great beauty. The sun had yet about an hour before

it sank behind the peaks of Monte Rosa, and the sky was clear, except

for a few white clouds that floated across the plain of Lombardy. Then

as we sat upon the crags, tufted with soldanellas and auriculas,

we could see a fleecy vapour gliding upward from the hollows of the

mountain, very thin and pale, yet dense enough to blot the landscape

to the south and east from sight. It rose with an imperceptible

motion, as the Oceanides might have soared from the sea to comfort

Prometheus in the tragedy of Æschylus. Already the sun had touched its

upper edge with gold, and we were expecting to be enveloped in a mist;

when suddenly upon the outspread sheet before us there appeared two

forms, larger than life, yet not gigantic, surrounded with haloes of

such tempered iridescence as the moon half hidden by a summer cloud is

wont to make. They were the glorified figures of ourselves; and what

we did, the phantoms mocked, rising or bowing, or spreading wide their

arms. Some scarce-felt breeze prevented the vapour from passing across

the ridge to westward, though it still rose from beneath, and kept

fading away into thin air above our heads. Therefore the vision lasted

as long as the sun stayed yet above the Alps; and the images with

their aureoles shrank and dilated with the undulations of the mist.

I could not but think of that old formula for an anthropomorphic

Deity--'the Brocken-spectre of the human spirit projected on the mists

of the Non-ego.' Even like those cloud-phantoms are the gods made in

the image of man, who have been worshipped through successive ages of

the world, gods dowered with like passions to those of the races

who have crouched before them, gods cruel and malignant and lustful,

jealous and noble and just, radiant or gloomy, the counterparts of men

upon a vast and shadowy scale. But here another question rose. If

the gods that men have made and ignorantly worshipped be really

but glorified copies of their own souls, where is the sun in this

parallel? Without the sun's rays the mists of Monte Generoso could

have shown, no shadowy forms. Without some other power than the mind

of man, could men have fashioned for themselves those ideals that they

named their gods? Unseen by Greek, or Norseman, or Hindoo, the potent

force by which alone they could externalise their image, existed

outside them, independent of their thought. Nor does the trite epigram

touch the surface of the real mystery. The sun, the human beings on

the mountain, and the mists are all parts of one material universe:

the transient phenomenon we witnessed was but the effect of a chance

combination. Is, then, the anthropomorphic God as momentary and as

accidental in the system of the world as that vapoury spectre? The

God in whom we live and move and have our being must be far more

all-pervasive, more incognisable by the souls of men, who doubt not

for one moment of His presence and His power. Except for purposes of

rhetoric the metaphor that seemed so clever fails. Nor, when once such

thoughts have been stirred in us by such a sight, can we do better

than repeat Goethe's sublime profession of a philosophic mysticism.

This translation I made one morning on the Pasterze Gletscher beneath

the spires of the Gross Glockner:--

To Him who from eternity, self-stirred,

Himself hath made by His creative word!

To Him, supreme, who causeth Faith to be,

Trust, Hope, Love, Power, and endless Energy!

To Him, who, seek to name Him as we will,

Unknown within Himself abideth still!

Strain ear and eye, till sight and sense be dim;

Thou'lt find but faint similitudes of Him:

Yea, and thy spirit in her flight of flame

Still strives to gauge the symbol and the name:

Charmed and compelled thou climb'st from height to height,

And round thy path the world shines wondrous bright;

Time, Space, and Size, and Distance cease to be,

And every step is fresh infinity.

What were the God who sat outside to scan

The spheres that 'neath His finger circling ran?

God dwells within, and moves the world and moulds,

Himself and Nature in one form enfolds:

Thus all that lives in Him and breathes and is,

Shall ne'er His puissance, ne'er His spirit miss.

The soul of man, too, is an universe:

Whence follows it that race with race concurs

In naming all it knows of good and true

God,--yea, its own God; and with homage due

Surrenders to His sway both earth and heaven;

Fears Him, and loves, where place for love is given.

* * * * *

_LOMBARD VIGNETTES_