Quello Ippogifo, grande e strano augello
Lo porta via.
“Orlando Furioso,” c. vi. xviii.
(That hippogriff, great and marvellous bird, bears him away.)
And now, accompanying this mysterious Zanoni, am I compelled to bid
a short farewell to Naples. Mount behind me,--mount on my hippogriff,
reader; settle yourself at your ease. I bought the pillion the other
day of a poet who loves his comfort; it has been newly stuffed for
your special accommodation. So, so, we ascend! Look as we ride
aloft,--look!--never fear, hippogriffs never stumble; and every
hippogriff in Italy is warranted to carry elderly gentlemen,--look down
on the gliding landscapes! There, near the ruins of the Oscan’s old
Atella, rises Aversa, once the stronghold of the Norman; there gleam the
columns of Capua, above the Vulturnian Stream. Hail to ye, cornfields
and vineyards famous for the old Falernian! Hail to ye, golden
orange-groves of Mola di Gaeta! Hail to ye, sweet shrubs and wild
flowers, omnis copia narium, that clothe the mountain-skirts of the
silent Lautulae! Shall we rest at the Volscian Anxur,--the modern
Terracina,--where the lofty rock stands like the giant that guards the
last borders of the southern land of love? Away, away! and hold your
breath as we flit above the Pontine Marshes. Dreary and desolate, their
miasma is to the gardens we have passed what the rank commonplace of
life is to the heart when it has left love behind.
Mournful Campagna, thou openest on us in majestic sadness. Rome,
seven-hilled Rome! receive us as Memory receives the way-worn; receive
us in silence, amidst ruins! Where is the traveller we pursue? Turn the
hippogriff loose to graze: he loves the acanthus that wreathes round
yon broken columns. Yes, that is the arch of Titus, the conqueror of
Jerusalem,--that the Colosseum! Through one passed the triumph of the
deified invader; in one fell the butchered gladiators. Monuments of
murder, how poor the thoughts, how mean the memories ye awaken, compared
with those that speak to the heart of man on the heights of Phyle, or
by thy lone mound, grey Marathon! We stand amidst weeds and brambles
and long waving herbage. Where we stand reigned Nero,--here were his
tessellated floors; here,
“Mighty in the heaven, a second heaven,”
hung the vault of his ivory roofs; here, arch upon arch, pillar on
pillar, glittered to the world the golden palace of its master,--the
Golden House of Nero. How the lizard watches us with his bright,
timorous eye! We disturb his reign. Gather that wild flower: the Golden
House is vanished, but the wild flower may have kin to those which the
stranger’s hand scattered over the tyrant’s grave; see, over this soil,
the grave of Rome, Nature strews the wild flowers still!
In the midst of this desolation is an old building of the middle ages.
Here dwells a singular recluse. In the season of the malaria the native
peasant flies the rank vegetation round; but he, a stranger and a
foreigner, no associates, no companions, except books and instruments
of science. He is often seen wandering over the grass-grown hills, or
sauntering through the streets of the new city, not with the absent brow
and incurious air of students, but with observant piercing eyes that
seem to dive into the hearts of the passers-by. An old man, but not
infirm,--erect and stately, as if in his prime. None know whether he be
rich or poor. He asks no charity, and he gives none,--he does no evil,
and seems to confer no good. He is a man who appears to have no world
beyond himself; but appearances are deceitful, and Science, as well as
Benevolence, lives in the Universe. This abode, for the first time since
thus occupied, a visitor enters. It is Zanoni.
You observe those two men seated together, conversing earnestly. Years
long and many have flown away since they met last,--at least, bodily,
and face to face. But if they are sages, thought can meet thought, and
spirit spirit, though oceans divide the forms. Death itself divides not
the wise. Thou meetest Plato when thine eyes moisten over the Phaedo.
May Homer live with all men forever!
They converse; they confess to each other; they conjure up the past, and
repeople it; but note how differently do such remembrances affect the
two. On Zanoni’s face, despite its habitual calm, the emotions change
and go. HE has acted in the past he surveys; but not a trace of the
humanity that participates in joy and sorrow can be detected on the
passionless visage of his companion; the past, to him, as is now
the present, has been but as Nature to the sage, the volume to the
student,--a calm and spiritual life, a study, a contemplation.
From the past they turn to the future. Ah! at the close of the last
century, the future seemed a thing tangible,--it was woven up in all
men’s fears and hopes of the present.
At the verge of that hundred years, Man, the ripest born of Time,
(“An des Jahrhunderts Neige, Der reifste Sohn der Zeit.” “Die
Kunstler.”)
stood as at the deathbed of the Old World, and beheld the New Orb,
blood-red amidst cloud and vapour,--uncertain if a comet or a sun.
Behold the icy and profound disdain on the brow of the old man,--the
lofty yet touching sadness that darkens the glorious countenance of
Zanoni. Is it that one views with contempt the struggle and its issue,
and the other with awe or pity? Wisdom contemplating mankind leads but
to the two results,--compassion or disdain. He who believes in other
worlds can accustom himself to look on this as the naturalist on
the revolutions of an ant-hill, or of a leaf. What is the Earth to
Infinity,--what its duration to the Eternal? Oh, how much greater is
the soul of one man than the vicissitudes of the whole globe! Child of
heaven, and heir of immortality, how from some star hereafter wilt
thou look back on the ant-hill and its commotions, from Clovis
to Robespierre, from Noah to the Final Fire. The spirit that can
contemplate, that lives only in the intellect, can ascend to its star,
even from the midst of the burial-ground called Earth, and while the
sarcophagus called Life immures in its clay the everlasting!
But thou, Zanoni,--thou hast refused to live ONLY in the intellect; thou
hast not mortified the heart; thy pulse still beats with the sweet music
of mortal passion; thy kind is to thee still something warmer than an
abstraction,--thou wouldst look upon this Revolution in its cradle,
which the storms rock; thou wouldst see the world while its elements yet
struggle through the chaos!
Go!