Più non ho la dolce speranza.
DIDONE.
“Seven mornings and evenings Immalee paced the sands of her lonely isle,
without seeing the stranger. She had still his promise to console her,
that they should meet in the world of suffering; and this she repeated
to herself as if it was full of hope and consolation. In this interval
she tried to educate herself for her introduction into this world, and
it was beautiful to see her attempting, from vegetable and animal
analogies, to form some image of the incomprehensible destiny of man. In
the shade she watched the withering flower.--“The blood that ran red
through its veins yesterday is purple to-day, and will be black and dry
to-morrow,” she said; “but it feels no pain--it dies patiently,--and the
ranunculus and tulip near it are untouched by grief for their companion,
or their colours would not be so resplendent. But can it be thus in the
world that thinks? Could I see _him_ wither and die, without withering
and dying along with him. Oh no! when that flower fades, I will be the
dew that falls over him!”
“She attempted to enlarge her comprehension, by observing the animal
world. A young loxia had fallen dead from its pendent nest; and Immalee,
looking into the aperture which that intelligent bird forms at the lower
extremity of the nest to secure it from birds of prey, perceived the old
ones with fire-flies in their small beaks, their young one lying dead
before them. At this sight Immalee burst into tears.--“Ah! you cannot
weep,” she said, “what an advantage I have over you! You eat, though
your young one, your own one, is dead; but could I ever drink of the
milk of the cocoa, if _he_ could no longer taste it? I begin to
comprehend what he said--to think, then, is to suffer--and a world of
thought must be a world of pain! But how delicious are these tears!
Formerly I wept for pleasure--but there is a pain sweeter than pleasure,
that I never felt till I beheld _him_. Oh! who would not think, to have
the joy of tears?”
“But Immalee did not occupy this interval solely in reflection; a new
anxiety began to agitate her; and in the intervals of her meditation and
her tears, she searched with avidity for the most glowing and
fantastically wreathed shells to deck her arms and hair with. She
changed her drapery of flowers every day, and never thought them fresh
after the first hour; then she filled her largest shells with the most
limpid water, and her hollow cocoa nuts with the most delicious figs,
interspersed with roses, and arranged them picturesquely on the stone
bench of the ruined pagoda. The time, however, passed over without the
arrival of the stranger, and Immalee, on visiting her fairy banquet the
next day, wept over the withered fruit, but dried her eyes, and hastened
to replace them.
“She was thus employed on the eighth morning, when she saw the stranger
approach; and the wild and innocent delight with which she bounded
towards him, excited in him for a moment a feeling of gloomy and
reluctant compunction, which Immalee’s quick susceptibility traced in
his pausing step and averted eye. She stood trembling in lovely and
pleading diffidence, as if intreating pardon for an unconscious offence,
and asking permission to approach by the very attitude in which she
forbore it, while tears stood in her eyes ready to fall at another
repelling motion. This sight “whetted his almost blunted purpose.” She
must learn to suffer, to qualify her to become my pupil, he thought.
“Immalee, you weep,” he added, approaching her. “Oh yes!” said Immalee,
smiling like a spring morning through her tears; “you are to teach me to
suffer, and I shall soon be very fit for your world--but I had rather
weep for you, than smile on a thousand roses.”--“Immalee,” said the
stranger, repelling the tenderness that melted him in spite of himself,
“Immalee, I come to shew you something of the world of thought you are
so anxious to inhabit, and of which you must soon become an inmate.
Ascend this hill where the palm-trees are clustering, and you shall see
a glimpse of part of it.”--“But I would like to see the whole, and all
at once!” said Immalee, with the natural avidity of thirsty and unfed
intellect, that believes it can swallow all things, and digest all
things. “The whole, and all at once!” said her conductor, turning to
smile at her as she bounded after him, breathless and glowing with newly
excited feeling. “I doubt the part you will see to-night will be more
than enough to satiate even your curiosity.” As he spoke he drew a tube
from his vest, and bid her apply it to her sight. The Indian obeyed him;
but, after gazing a moment, uttered the emphatic exclamation, “I am
there!--or are they here?” and sunk on the earth in a frenzy of delight.
She rose again in a moment, and eagerly seizing the telescope, applied
it in a wrong direction, which disclosed merely the sea to her view, and
exclaimed sadly, “Gone!--gone--all that beautiful world lived and died
in a moment--all that I love die so--my dearest roses live not half so
long as those I neglect--you were absent for seven moons since I first
saw you, and the beautiful world lived only a moment.”
“The stranger again directed the telescope towards the shore of India,
from which they were not far distant, and Immalee again exclaimed in
rapture, “Alive and more beautiful than ever!--all living, thinking
things!--their _very walk thinks_. No mute fishes, and senseless trees,
but wonderful rocks(12), on which they look with pride, as if they were
the works of their own hands. Beautiful rocks! how I love the perfect
straitness of your sides, and the crisped and flower-like knots of your
decorated tops! Oh that flowers grew, and birds fluttered round you, and
then I would prefer you even to the rocks under which I watch the
setting sun! Oh what a world must that be where nothing is natural, and
every thing beautiful!--thought must have done all that. But, how
_little every thing is_!--thought should have made every thing
larger--_thought should be a god_. But,” she added with quick
intelligence and self-accusing diffidence, “perhaps I am wrong.
Sometimes I have thought I could lay my hand on the top of a palm-tree,
but when, after a long, long time, I came close to it, I could not have
reached its lowest leaf were I ten times higher than I am. Perhaps your
beautiful world may grow higher as I approach it.”--“Hold, Immalee,”
said the stranger, taking the telescope from her hands, “to enjoy this
sight you should understand it.”--“Oh yes!” said Immalee, with
submissive anxiety, as the world of sense rapidly lost ground in her
imagination against the new-found world of mind,--“yes--let me
think.”--“Immalee, have you any religion?” said the visitor, as an
indescribable feeling of pain made his pale brow still paler. Immalee,
quick in understanding and sympathising with physical feeling, darted
away at these words, returned in a moment with a banyan leaf, with which
she wiped the drops from his livid forehead; and then seating herself at
his feet, in an attitude of profound but eager attention, repeated,
“_Religion!_ what is that? is it a new thought?”--“It is the
consciousness of a Being superior to all worlds and their inhabitants,
because he is the Maker of all, and will be their judge--of a Being whom
we cannot see, but in whose power and presence we must believe, though
invisible--of one who is every where unseen; always acting, though never
in motion; hearing all things, but never heard.” Immalee interrupted
with an air of distraction--“Hold! too many thoughts will kill me--let
me pause. I have seen the shower that came to refresh the rose-tree beat
it to the earth.” After an effort of solemn recollection, she added,
“The voice of dreams told me something like that before I was born, but
it is so long ago,--sometimes I have had thoughts within me like that
voice. I have thought I loved the things around me too much, and that I
should love things _beyond_ me--flowers that could not fade, and a sun
that never sets. I could have sprung, like a bird into the air, after
such a thought--but there was no one to shew me that path upward.” And
the young enthusiast lifted towards heaven eyes in which trembled the
tears of ecstatic imaginings, and then turned their mute pleadings on
the stranger.
(12) Intellige “buildings.”
“It is right,” he continued, “not only to have thoughts of this Being,
but to express them by some outward acts. The inhabitants of the world
you are about to see, call this, _worship_,--and they have adopted (a
Satanic smile curled his lip as he spoke) very different modes; so
different, that, in fact, there is but one point in which they all
agree--that of making their religion a torment;--the religion of some
prompting them to torture themselves, and the religion of some prompting
them to torture others. Though, as I observed, they all agree in this
important point, yet unhappily they differ so much about the mode, that
there has been much disturbance about it in the world that thinks.”--“In
the world that _thinks_!” repeated Immalee, “Impossible! Surely they
must know that a difference cannot be acceptable to Him who is
One.”--“And have you then adopted no mode of expressing your thoughts of
this Being, that is, of worshipping him?” said the stranger.--“I smile
when the sun rises in its beauty, and I weep when I see the evening star
rise,” said Immalee.--“And do you recoil at the inconsistencies of
varied modes of worship, and yet you yourself employ smiles and tears in
your address to the Deity?”--“I do,--for they are both the expressions
of joy with me,” said the poor Indian; “the sun is as happy when he
smiles through the rain-clouds, as when he burns in the mid-height of
heaven, in the fierceness of his beauty; and I am happy whether I smile
or I weep.”--“Those whom you are about to see,” said the stranger,
offering her the telescope, “are as remote in their forms of worship as
smiles from tears; but they are not, like you, equally happy in both.”
Immalee applied her eye to the telescope, and exclaimed in rapture at
what she saw. “What do you see?” said the stranger. Immalee described
what she saw with many imperfect expressions, which, perhaps, may be
rendered more intelligible by the explanatory words of the stranger.
“You see,” said he, “the coast of India, the shores of the world near
you.--There is the black pagoda of Juggernaut, that enormous building on
which your eye is first fixed. Beside it stands a Turkish mosque--you
may distinguish it by a figure like that of the half-moon. It is the
will of him who rules that world, that its inhabitants should worship
him by that sign(13). At a small distance you may see a low building
with a trident on its summit--that is the temple of Maha-deva, one of
the ancient goddesses of the country.”--“But the houses are nothing to
me,” said Immalee, “shew me the living things that go there. The houses
are not half so beautiful as the rocks on the shore, draperied all over
with sea-weeds and mosses, and shaded by the distant palm-tree and
cocoa.”--“But those buildings,” said the tempter, “are indicative of the
various modes of thinking of those who frequent them. If it is into
their thoughts you wish to look, you must see them expressed by their
actions. In their dealings with each other, men are generally deceitful,
but in their dealings with their gods, they are tolerably sincere in the
expression of the character they assign them in their imaginations. If
that character be formidable, they express fear; if it be one of
cruelty, they indicate it by the sufferings they inflict on themselves;
if it be gloomy, the image of the god is faithfully reflected in the
visage of the worshipper. Look and judge.”
(13) Tippoo Saib wished to substitute the Mohamedan for the Indian
mythology throughout his dominions. This circumstance, though long
antedated, is therefore imaginable.
“Immalee looked and saw a vast sandy plain, with the dark pagoda of
Juggernaut in the perspective. On this plain lay the bones of a thousand
skeletons, bleaching in the burning and unmoistened air. A thousand
human bodies, hardly more alive, and scarce less emaciated, were
trailing their charred and blackened bodies over the sands, to perish
under the shadow of the temple, hopeless of ever reaching that of its
walls.
“Multitudes of them dropt dead as they crawled. Multitudes still living,
faintly waved their hands, to scare the vultures that hovered nearer and
nearer at every swoop, and scooped the poor remnants of flesh from the
living bones of the screaming victim, and retreated, with an answering
scream of disappointment at the scanty and tasteless morsel they had
torn away.
“Many tried, in their false and fanatic zeal, to double their torments,
by crawling through the sands on their hands and knees; but hands
through the backs of which the nails had grown, and knees worn literally
to the bone, struggled but feebly amid the sands and the skeletons, and
the bodies that were soon to be skeletons, and the vultures that were to
make them so.
“Immalee withheld her breath, as if she inhaled the abominable effluvia
of this mass of putrefaction, which is said to desolate the shores near
the temple of Juggernaut, like a pestilence.
“Close to this fearful scene, came on a pageant, whose splendour made a
brilliant and terrible contrast to the loathsome and withering
desolation of animal and intellectual life, amid which its pomp came
towering, and sparkling, and trembling on. An enormous fabric, more
resembling a moving palace than a triumphal car, supported the inshrined
image of Juggernaut, and was dragged forward by the united strength of a
thousand human bodies, priests, victims, brahmins, faqueers and all. In
spite of this huge force, the impulse was so unequal, that the whole
edifice rocked and tottered from time to time, and this singular union
of instability and splendour, of trembling decadence and terrific glory,
gave a faithful image of the meretricious exterior, and internal
hollowness, of idolatrous religion. As the procession moved on,
sparkling amid desolation, and triumphant amid death, multitudes rushed
forward from time to time, to prostrate themselves under the wheels of
the enormous machine, which crushed them to atoms in a moment, and
passed on;--others “cut themselves with knives and lancets after their
manner,” and not believing themselves worthy to perish beneath the
wheels of the idol’s chariot, sought to propitiate him by dying the
tracks of those wheels with their blood;--their relatives and friends
shouted with delight as they saw the streams of blood dye the car and
its line of progress, and hoped for an interest in these voluntary
sacrifices, with as much energy, and perhaps as much reason, as the
Catholic votarist does in the penance of St Bruno, or the ex-oculation
of St Lucia, or the martyrdom of St Ursula and her eleven thousand
virgins, which, being interpreted, means the martyrdom of a single
female named _Undecimilla_, which the Catholic legends read _Undecim
Mille_.
“The procession went on, amid that mixture of rites that characterizes
idolatry in all countries,--half resplendent, half horrible--appealing
to nature while they rebel against her--mingling flowers with blood, and
casting alternately a screaming infant, or a garland of roses, beneath
the car of the idol.
“Such was the picture that presented to the strained, incredulous eyes
of Immalee, those mingled features of magnificence and horror,--of joy
and suffering,--of crushed flowers and mangled bodies,--of magnificence
calling on torture for its triumph,--and the steam of blood and the
incense of the rose, inhaled at once by the triumphant nostrils of an
incarnate demon, who rode amid the wrecks of nature and the spoils of
the heart! Immalee gazed on in horrid curiosity. She saw, by the aid of
the telescope, a boy seated on the front of the moving temple, who
“perfected the praise” of the loathsome idol, with all the outrageous
lubricities of the Phallic worship. From the slightest consciousness of
the meaning of this phenomenon, her unimaginable purity protected her as
with a shield. It was in vain that the tempter plied her with questions,
and hints of explanation, and offers of illustration. He found her
chill, indifferent, and even incurious. He gnashed his teeth and gnawed
his lip _en parenthese_. But when she saw mothers cast their infants
under the wheels of the car, and then turn to watch the wild and wanton
dance of the Almahs, and appear, by their open lips and clapped hands,
to keep time to the sound of the silver bells that tinkled round their
slight ankles, while their infants were writhing in their dying
agony,--she dropt the telescope in horror, and exclaimed, “The world
that thinks does not feel. I never saw the rose kill the bud!”
“But look again,” said the tempter, “to that square building of stone,
round which a few stragglers are collected, and whose summit is
surmounted by a trident,--that is the temple of Maha-deva, a goddess who
possesses neither the power or the popularity of the great idol
Juggernaut. Mark how her worshippers approach her.” Immalee looked, and
saw women offering flowers, fruits, and perfumes; and some young girls
brought birds in cages, whom they set free; others, after making vows
for the safety of some absent, sent a small and gaudy boat of paper,
illuminated with wax, down the stream of an adjacent river, with
injunctions never to sink till it reached him.
“Immalee smiled with pleasure at the rites of this harmless and elegant
superstition. “This is not the religion of torment,” said she.--“Look
again,” said the stranger. She did, and beheld those very women whose
hands had been employed in liberating birds from their cages,
suspending, on the branches of the trees which shadowed the temple of
Maha-deva, baskets containing their new-born infants, who were left
there to perish with hunger, or be devoured by the birds, while their
mothers danced and sung in honour of the goddess.
“Others were occupied in conveying, apparently with the most zealous and
tender watchfulness, their aged parents to the banks of the river,
where, after assisting them to perform their ablations, with all the
intensity of filial and divine piety, they left them half immersed in
the water, to be devoured by alligators, who did not suffer their
wretched prey to linger in long expectation of their horrible death;
while others were deposited in the jungles near the banks of the river,
where they met with a fate as certain and as horrible, from the tigers
who infested it, and whose yell soon hushed the feeble wail of their
unresisting victims.
“Immalee sunk on the earth at this spectacle, and clasping both hands
over her eyes, remained speechless with grief and horror.
“Look yet again,” said the stranger, “the rites of all religions are not
so bloody.” Once more she looked, and saw a Turkish mosque, towering in
all the splendour that accompanied the first introduction of the
religion of Mahomet among the Hindoos. It reared its gilded domes, and
carved minarets, and crescented pinnacles, rich with all the profusion
which the decorative imagination of Oriental architecture, at once light
and luxuriant, gorgeous and aerial, delights to lavish on its favourite
works.
“A group of stately Turks were approaching the mosque, at the call of
the muezzin. Around the building arose neither tree nor shrub; it
borrowed neither shade nor ornament from nature; it had none of those
soft and graduating shades and hues, which seem to unite the works of
God and the creature for the glory of the former, and calls on the
inventive magnificence of art, and the spontaneous loveliness of nature,
to magnify the Author of both; it stood the independent work and emblem
of vigorous hands and proud minds, such as appeared to belong to those
who now approached it as worshippers. Their finely featured and
thoughtful countenances, their majestic habits, and lofty figures,
formed an imposing contrast to the unintellectual expression, the
crouching posture, and the half naked squalidness of some poor Hindoos,
who, seated on their hams, were eating their mess of rice, as the
stately Turks passed on to their devotions. Immalee viewed them with a
feeling of awe and pleasure, and began to think there might be some good
in the religion professed by these noble-looking beings. But, before
they entered the mosque, they spurned and spit at the unoffending and
terrified Hindoos; they struck them with the flats of their sabres, and,
terming them dogs of idolaters, they cursed them in the name of God and
the prophet. Immalee, revolted and indignant at the sight, though she
could not hear the words that accompanied it, demanded the reason of it.
“Their religion,” said the stranger, “binds them to hate all who do not
worship as they do.”--“Alas!” said Immalee, weeping, “is not that hatred
which their religion teaches, a proof that theirs is the worst? But
why,” she added, her features illuminated with all the wild and
sparkling intelligence of wonder, while flushed with recent fears, “why
do I not see among them some of those lovelier beings, whose habits
differ from theirs, and whom you call women? Why do they not worship
also; or have they a milder religion of their own?”--“_That_ religion,”
replied the stranger, “is not very favourable to those beings, of whom
you are the loveliest; it teaches that men shall have different
companions in the world of souls; nor does it clearly intimate that
women shall ever arrive there. Hence you may see some of these excluded
beings wandering amid those stones that designate the place of their
dead, repeating prayers for the dead whom they dare not hope to join;
and others, who are old and indigent, seated at the doors of the mosque,
reading aloud passages from a book lying on their knees, (which they
call the Koran), with the hope of soliciting alms, not of exciting
devotion.” At these desolating words, Immalee, who had in vain looked to
any of these systems for that hope or solace which her pure spirit and
vivid imagination alike thirsted for, felt a recoiling of the soul
unutterable at religion thus painted to her, and exhibiting only a
frightful picture of blood and cruelty, of the inversion of every
principle of nature, and the disruption of every tie of the heart.
“She flung herself on the ground, and exclaiming, “There is no God, if
there be none but theirs!” then, starting up as if to take a last view,
in the desperate hope that all was an illusion, she discovered a small
obscure building overshaded by palm-trees, and surmounted by a cross;
and struck by the unobtrusive simplicity of its appearance, and the
scanty number and peaceable demeanour of the few who were approaching
it, she exclaimed, that this must be a new religion, and eagerly
demanded its name and rites. The stranger evinced some uneasiness at the
discovery she had made, and testified still more reluctance to answer
the questions which it suggested; but they were pressed with such
restless and coaxing importunity, and the beautiful being who urged them
made such an artless transition from profound and meditative grief to
childish, yet intelligent curiosity, that it was not in man, or more or
less than man, to resist her.
“Her glowing features, as she turned them toward him, with an expression
half impatient, half pleading, were indeed those “(14)of a stilled
infant smiling through its tears.” Perhaps, too, another cause might
have operated on this prophet of curses, and made him utter a blessing
where he meant malediction; but into this we dare not inquire, nor will
it ever be fully known till the day when all secrets must be disclosed.
However it was, he felt himself compelled to tell her it was a new
religion, the religion of Christ, whose rites and worshippers she
beheld. “But what are the rites?” asked Immalee. “Do they murder their
children, or their parents, to prove their love to God? Do they hang
them on baskets to perish, or leave them on the banks of rivers to be
devoured by fierce and hideous animals?”--“The religion they profess
forbids that,” said the stranger, with reluctant truth; “it requires
them to honour their parents, and to cherish their children.”--“But why
do they not spurn from the entrance to their church those who do not
think as they do?”--“Because their religion enjoins them to be mild,
benevolent, and tolerant; and neither to reject or disdain those who
have not attained its purer light.”--“But why is there no splendour or
magnificence in their worship; nothing grand or attractive?”--“Because
they know that God cannot be acceptably worshipped but by pure hearts
and crimeless hands; and though their religion gives every hope to the
penitent guilty, it flatters none with false promises of external
devotion supplying the homage of the heart; or artificial and
picturesque religion standing in the place of that single devotion to
God, before whose throne, though the proudest temples erected to his
honour crumble into dust, the heart burns on the altar still, an
inextinguishable and acceptable victim.”
(14) I trust the absurdity of this quotation here will be forgiven for
its beauty. It is borrowed from Miss Baillie, the first dramatic poet
of the age.
“As he spoke, (perhaps constrained by a higher power), Immalee bowed her
glowing face to the earth, and then raising it with the look of a
new-born angel, exclaimed, “Christ shall be my God, and I will be a
Christian!” Again she bowed in the deep prostration which indicates the
united submission of soul and body, and remained in this attitude of
absorption so long, that, when she rose, she did not perceive the
absence of her companion.--“He fled murmuring, and with him fled the
shades of night.”