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