Those Sirens! They have called me back, after nearly three months in
Florence, to that village on the hill-top. Nothing but smiles up there.
And never was Corsanico more charming, all drenched in sunlight and
pranked out with fresh green. On this fourteenth of May, I said to
myself, I am wont to attend a certain yearly festival far away, and
there enjoy myself prodigiously. Yet--can it be possible?--I am even
happier here. Seldom does the event surpass one's hopes.
Later than usual, long after sunset, under olives already heavy-laden,
through patches of high-standing corn and beans, across the little
brook, past that familiar and solitary farmhouse, I descended to the
canal, in full content. Another golden moment of life! Strong
exhalations rose up from the swampy soil, that teemed and steamed under
the hot breath of spring; the pond-like water, once so bare, was
smothered under a riot of monstrous marsh-plants and loud with the music
of love-sick frogs. Stars were reflected on its surface.
Star-gazing, my Star? Would I were Heaven, to gaze on thee with many
eyes.
Such was my mood, a Hellenic mood, a mood summed up in that one word
[Greek: tetelestai]--not to be taken, however, in the sense of "all's
over." Quite the reverse! Did Shelley ever walk in like humour along
this canal? I doubt it. He lacked the master-key. An evangelist of a
kind, he was streaked, for all his paganism, with the craze of
world-improvement. One day he escaped from his chains into those
mountains and there beheld a certain Witch--only to be called back to
mortality by a domestic and critic-bitten lady. He tried to translate
the Symposium. He never tried to live it....