Thus man pursues his weary calling,
And wrings the hard life from the sky,
While happiness unseen is falling
Down from God’s bosom silently.
--Schiller.
In one of those islands whose history the imperishable literature and
renown of Athens yet invest with melancholy interest, and on which
Nature, in whom “there is nothing melancholy,” still bestows a glory of
scenery and climate equally radiant for the freeman or the
slave,--the Ionian, the Venetian, the Gaul, the Turk, or the restless
Briton,--Zanoni had fixed his bridal home. There the air carries with it
the perfumes of the plains for miles along the blue, translucent deep.
(See Dr. Holland’s “Travels to the Ionian Isles,” etc., page 18.) Seen
from one of its green sloping heights, the island he had selected seemed
one delicious garden. The towers and turrets of its capital gleaming
amidst groves of oranges and lemons; vineyards and olive-woods filling
up the valleys, and clambering along the hill-sides; and villa, farm,
and cottage covered with luxuriant trellises of dark-green leaves and
purple fruit. For there the prodigal beauty yet seems half to justify
those graceful superstitions of a creed that, too enamoured of earth,
rather brought the deities to man, than raised the man to their less
alluring and less voluptuous Olympus.
And still to the fishermen, weaving yet their antique dances on the
sand; to the maiden, adorning yet, with many a silver fibula, her glossy
tresses under the tree that overshadows her tranquil cot,--the same
Great Mother that watched over the wise of Samos, the democracy of
Corcyra, the graceful and deep-taught loveliness of Miletus, smiles
as graciously as of yore. For the North, philosophy and freedom are
essentials to human happiness; in the lands which Aphrodite rose from
the waves to govern, as the Seasons, hand in hand, stood to welcome her
on the shores, Nature is all sufficient. (Homeric Hymn.)
The isle which Zanoni had selected was one of the loveliest in that
divine sea. His abode, at some distance from the city, but near one of
the creeks on the shore, belonged to a Venetian, and, though small, had
more of elegance than the natives ordinarily cared for. On the seas, and
in sight, rode his vessel. His Indians, as before, ministered in
mute gravity to the service of the household. No spot could be more
beautiful,--no solitude less invaded. To the mysterious knowledge of
Zanoni, to the harmless ignorance of Viola, the babbling and garish
world of civilised man was alike unheeded. The loving sky and the lovely
earth are companions enough to Wisdom and to Ignorance while they love.
Although, as I have before said, there was nothing in the visible
occupations of Zanoni that betrayed a cultivator of the occult sciences,
his habits were those of a man who remembers or reflects. He loved
to roam alone, chiefly at dawn, or at night, when the moon was clear
(especially in each month, at its rise and full), miles and miles away
over the rich inlands of the island, and to cull herbs and flowers,
which he hoarded with jealous care. Sometimes, at the dead of night,
Viola would wake by an instinct that told her he was not by her side,
and, stretching out her arms, find that the instinct had not deceived
her. But she early saw that he was reserved on his peculiar habits; and
if at times a chill, a foreboding, a suspicious awe crept over her, she
forebore to question him.
But his rambles were not always unaccompanied,--he took pleasure in
excursions less solitary. Often, when the sea lay before them like
a lake, the barren dreariness of the opposite coast of Cephallenia
contrasting the smiling shores on which they dwelt, Viola and himself
would pass days in cruising slowly around the coast, or in visits to
the neighbouring isles. Every spot of the Greek soil, “that fair
Fable-Land,” seemed to him familiar; and as he conversed of the past and
its exquisite traditions, he taught Viola to love the race from which
have descended the poetry and the wisdom of the world. There was much in
Zanoni, as she knew him better, that deepened the fascination in which
Viola was from the first enthralled. His love for herself was so tender,
so vigilant, and had that best and most enduring attribute, that it
seemed rather grateful for the happiness in its own cares than vain of
the happiness it created. His habitual mood with all who approached him
was calm and gentle, almost to apathy. An angry word never passed his
lips,--an angry gleam never shot from his eyes. Once they had been
exposed to the danger not uncommon in those then half-savage lands. Some
pirates who infested the neighbouring coasts had heard of the arrival
of the strangers, and the seamen Zanoni employed had gossiped of their
master’s wealth. One night, after Viola had retired to rest, she was
awakened by a slight noise below. Zanoni was not by her side; she
listened in some alarm. Was that a groan that came upon her ear? She
started up, she went to the door; all was still. A footstep now slowly
approached, and Zanoni entered calm as usual, and seemed unconscious of
her fears.
The next morning three men were found dead at the threshold of the
principal entrance, the door of which had been forced. They were
recognised in the neighbourhood as the most sanguinary and terrible
marauders of the coasts,--men stained with a thousand murders, and who
had never hitherto failed in any attempt to which the lust of rapine
had impelled them. The footsteps of many others were tracked to the
seashore. It seemed that their accomplices must have fled on the death
of their leaders. But when the Venetian Proveditore, or authority, of
the island, came to examine into the matter, the most unaccountable
mystery was the manner in which these ruffians had met their fate.
Zanoni had not stirred from the apartment in which he ordinarily pursued
his chemical studies. None of the servants had even been disturbed from
their slumbers. No marks of human violence were on the bodies of the
dead. They died, and made no sign. From that moment Zanoni’s house--nay,
the whole vicinity--was sacred. The neighbouring villages, rejoiced
to be delivered from a scourge, regarded the stranger as one whom the
Pagiana (or Virgin) held under her especial protection.
In truth, the lively Greeks around, facile to all external impressions,
and struck with the singular and majestic beauty of the man who knew
their language as a native, whose voice often cheered them in their
humble sorrows, and whose hand was never closed to their wants,
long after he had left their shore preserved his memory by grateful
traditions, and still point to the lofty platanus beneath which they had
often seen him seated, alone and thoughtful, in the heats of noon. But
Zanoni had haunts less open to the gaze than the shade of the platanus.
In that isle there are the bituminous springs which Herodotus has
commemorated. Often at night, the moon, at least, beheld him emerging
from the myrtle and cystus that clothe the hillocks around the marsh
that imbeds the pools containing the inflammable materia, all the
medical uses of which, as applied to the nerves of organic life, modern
science has not yet perhaps explored. Yet more often would he pass
his hours in a cavern, by the loneliest part of the beach, where the
stalactites seem almost arranged by the hand of art, and which the
superstition of the peasants associates, in some ancient legends, with
the numerous and almost incessant earthquakes to which the island is so
singularly subjected.
Whatever the pursuits that instigated these wanderings and favoured
these haunts, either they were linked with, or else subordinate to, one
main and master desire, which every fresh day passed in the sweet human
company of Viola confirmed and strengthened.
The scene that Glyndon had witnessed in his trance was faithful to
truth. And some little time after the date of that night, Viola
was dimly aware that an influence, she knew not of what nature, was
struggling to establish itself over her happy life. Visions indistinct
and beautiful, such as those she had known in her earlier days, but more
constant and impressive, began to haunt her night and day when Zanoni
was absent, to fade in his presence, and seem less fair than THAT.
Zanoni questioned her eagerly and minutely of these visitations, but
seemed dissatisfied, and at times perplexed, by her answers.
“Tell me not,” he said, one day, “of those unconnected images, those
evolutions of starry shapes in a choral dance, or those delicious
melodies that seem to thee of the music and the language of the distant
spheres. Has no ONE shape been to thee more distinct and more beautiful
than the rest,--no voice uttering, or seeming to utter, thine own
tongue, and whispering to thee of strange secrets and solemn knowledge?”
“No; all is confused in these dreams, whether of day or night; and when
at the sound of thy footsteps I recover, my memory retains nothing but
a vague impression of happiness. How different--how cold--to the rapture
of hanging on thy smile, and listening to thy voice, when it says, ‘I
love thee!’”
“Yet, how is it that visions less fair than these once seemed to thee
so alluring? How is it that they then stirred thy fancies and filled
thy heart? Once thou didst desire a fairy-land, and now thou seemest so
contented with common life.”
“Have I not explained it to thee before? Is it common life, then, to
love, and to live with the one we love? My true fairy-land is won! Speak
to me of no other.”
And so night surprised them by the lonely beach; and Zanoni, allured
from his sublimer projects, and bending over that tender face, forgot
that, in the Harmonious Infinite which spread around, there were other
worlds than that one human heart.