Stella was obliged to drive this dark-eyed butterfly to her devotions. If I discovered her, I had no reverence, and tried unmercifully to interrupt her soft whispers. Stella's loving revenge for my wickedness was to give me a tiny wax sleeping Bambino, surrounded by flowers under a convex glass, whose minute face had a heaven of smiling forgiveness in it. Often I surreptitiously studied the smile on the sleeping face. I felt that He loved us even during His sleep; and I cherished the gaze of shining gladness with which Stella herself had placed this treasure in my hand, which could so simply quicken sluggish thought.
To give a clearer glimpse of the villa, which with our life there became one of the most precious of our memories, and a glimpse also of one or two people and events, I will insert this letter from my mother: —
August 14, 1858.
MY DEAR ELIZABETH, — Una and Rose were getting pale for the first time in their lives, and Mr. Hawthorne was languid and weary of the city life, and an English lady, a friend of the Brownings, told us of this villa, which the Count da Montauto wished to let this summer, though never before, and so we tried for it and got it. It is a most enchanting situation, and the villa is immensely large and very nice. We have an old mediaeval tower at the oldest end, in which Savonarola was confined, and from its summit we have a view which one might dream of, but seldom see. We are so high, however, that from the first floor we have a sweeping view, and look down on the most sumptuous valley of the Arno from our western windows, — a level plain, cultivated every inch with grapes and olives and other fruits; and all round rise up soft hills, and the Apennines afar off where the sun sets. We see the noble white steers slowly moving in the valley, among the trees, ploughing as in the days of Cincinnatus. An infinite peace and quiet reign. We hear birds, and in the evening the cue owl utters his melodious, melancholy one note. The world does not disturb us. The air is as pure and fresh as air can possibly be, blowing from the sweet, carefully tended plain, and sweeping down from the mountains. Near us is the villa and tower of Aurora Leigh, just at the end of our estate, and farther off is Galileo's tower, where he studied the heavens. Northeast from us lies the beautiful Florence, burning in the bottom of the cup of hills, with all its domes and campaniles, palaces and churches. Fiesole, the cradle of Florence, is visible among the heights at the east, and San Miniato, with its grove of cypresses, is farther off to the south. There is no end of beauty and interest, and the view becomes ideal and poetic the moment the sun begins its decline; for then the rose and purple mists drape the hills, and mountains — the common earth — turn to amethysts, topazes, and sapphires, and words can never convey an idea of the opaline heavens, which seem to have illimitable abysses of a penetrable substance, made up of the light of pearls.
Literally and carefully I speak of the light of pearls, with the opaline changes. I am quite happy that I have seized the image. The effect is of a roundness with the confused yet clear outline of a pearl, an outline which also is not one, and the light looks living and absorbing. One evening, after the sun went down, rays of blue and rose came from it in a half-wheel shape, so ineffably delicate that if we looked too pryingly they were not there, but if we glanced unawares there they were. It was more like the thought of them than the realities. This summer we have our first sight of Italian sunsets, for we were assured we should have fever if we were out at the hour in Rome. We began by watching them from the bridges over the Arno, which are perhaps the finest points of view, because the river is added. It flows east and west, and so we have all the glory by standing on either of the bridges. The arches, the reflections in the waters, the city's palaces and churches, the distant hills, all come in for a part of the pomp and splendor, — all that man can do, all that God has done, for this lovely land.
Una's chamber is in the tower [but approached from the house], a large, lofty, vaulted chamber, with an oratory attached, full of Madonnas, pyxes, “and all sorts,” as Mr. Browning says. There is a regular chapel besides. Mr. Hawthorne has a delightful suite of study, saloon, dressing-room, and chamber, away from all the rest of the family.
August 25. Last evening Miss Ada Shepard and I went to a neighboring villa to see some table-turning, which I have never seen, nor anything appertaining to spirits. Mr. Frank Boott was there and a Fleming, Una's drawing-master. We tried patiently for two hours with the table, but though it trembled and wavered, nothing came of it; so Miss Shepard then took a pencil and paper for the spirits to write, if they would. [The attempt on Miss Shepard's part was now, and always afterwards, successful. My mother speaks of several somewhat vulgar spirits who caused great merriment.] Then Ada felt quite a different and new power seize her hand, rapidly writing: “Who?” “Mother.” “Whose mother?” “Mrs. Hawthorne's. My dear child, I am with you. I wish to speak to you. My dearest child, I am near you. I am oftener with you than with any one.” Ada's hand was carried forcibly back to make a strong underline beneath “near,” and it was all written with the most eager haste, so that it agitated the medium very much, and me too; for I had kept aloof in mind, because Mr. Hawthorne has such a repugnance to the whole thing. Mrs. Browning is a spiritualist. Mr. Browning opposes and protests with all his might, but he says he is ready to be convinced. Mrs. Browning is wonderfully interesting. She is the most delicate sheath for a soul I ever saw. One evening at Casa Guidi there was a conversation about spirits, and a marvelous story was told of two hands that crowned Mrs. Browning with a wreath through the mediumship of Mr. Hume. Mr. Browning declared that he believed the two hands were made by Mr. Hume and fastened to Mr. Hume's toes, and that he made them move by moving his feet. Mrs. Browning kept trying to stem his flow of eager, funny talk with her slender voice, but, like an arrowy river, he rushed and foamed and leaped over her slight tones, and she could not succeed in explaining how she knew they were spirit hands. She will certainly be in Rome next winter, unless she goes to Egypt. You would be infinitely charmed with Mrs. Browning, and with Mr. Browning as well. The latter is very mobile, and flings himself about just as he flings his thoughts on paper, and his wife is still and contemplative. Love, evidently, has saved her life. I think with you that “'Aurora Leigh' overflows with well-considered thought;” and I think all literature does not contain such a sweet baby, so dewy, so soft, so tender, so fresh. Mr. Hawthorne read me the book in Southport, but I have read it now again, sitting in our loggia, with Aurora's tower full in view. . . .
This loggia opened widely to the air on two sides, so that the opalescent views were framed in oblong borders of stone that rested our rejoicing eyes. Under the stone shade, in the centre of the Raphaelesque distances, many mornings were passed ideally. Visitors often joined us here. Among them was Miss Elizabeth Boott, afterwards Mrs. Duveneck, who came with her little sketch-book. She made a water-color portrait of my father, which, as the young artist was then but a girl, looked like a cherub of pug-nosed, pink good nature, with its head loose. I can see that little sketch now, and I feel still a wave of the dizziness of my indignation at its strange depiction of a strong man reduced to dollhood. Miss Boott being a true artist in the bud, there was, of course, the eerie likeness of some unlike portraits. It became famous with us all as the most startling semblance we had ever witnessed. I sincerely wish that the ardor with which the young girl made her sketch could have been used later on a portrait, which certainly would have been superbly honest and vigorous, like all the work that has come from her wonderfully noble nature and her skillful perception. Another young lady appeared against the Raphaelesque landscape. She was very pretty in every way, and my mother was delighted to have her present, and showered endearing epithets upon her. Her large brown eyes were alluring beyond words, and her features pathetically piquant and expressive. Her face was rather round, pale, and emphatically saddened by the great sculptor Regret. She sat in picturesque attitudes, her cheek leaning against her hand, and her elbow somewhere on the back or arm of her chair; yet her positions were never excessive, but eminently gentle. She had been disappointed
in love, and one was sure it was not in the love of the young man. She was too pretty to die, but she could look sad, and we all liked to have her with us, and preferred her charming misery to any other mood.
The roads going to and fro between the cream-colored stone walls of the surrounding country were unsparingly hot. I can feel now the flash of sunbeams that made me expect to curl up and die like a bit of vegetation in a flame. I tried to feel cooler when I saw the peasant women approaching, bent under their loads of wheat or of brush. If they had no shading load, it made me gasp to observe that their Tuscan hats, as large as cart-wheels and ostensibly meant to shadow their faces, were either dangling in their hands or flapping backward uselessly. It seemed to be no end of a walk to Florence, and the drive thither was also detestable, — all from the heat and dust, and probably only at that time of year. The views of many-colored landscape, hazy with steaming fields, were lovely if you could once muster the energy to gaze across the high road-walls when the thoroughfare sank clown a declivity. After a while there were cottages, outside of which ancient crones sat knitting like the wind, or spinning as smoothly as machines, by the aid of a distaff. Little girls, who were full-fledged peasant women in everything but size, pecked away at their knitting of blue socks, proud of their lately won skill and patient of the undesired toil. They were so small and comely and conformable, and yet conveyed such an idea of volcanic force ready to rebel, that they entranced me. Further inside the heart of the city upstarted the intoxications of sin and the terrible beggars with their maimed children. I never lost the impressions of human wrong there gathered into a telling argument. The crowded hurry and the dirty creatures that attend commercial greed and selfish enjoyment in cities everywhere weltered along the sidewalks and unhesitatingly plunged into the mud of the streets. It seemed to me even then that something should be done for the children maimed by inhuman fathers, and for their weeping mothers too. My father did not forget in his art the note he found in beautiful Florence, though it was too sad to introduce by a definite exposition, and falls upon the ear, in “Monte Beni,” like a wordless minor chord.
I sometimes went with my mother when she called at Casa Guidi, where the Brownings lived. I had a fixed idea that Galileo belonged to their family circle; and I had a vision of him in my mind which was quite as clear as Mrs. Browning ever was (although I sat upon her lap), representing him as holding the sun captive in his back yard, while he blinked down upon it from a high prison of his own. The house, as I recall it, seemed to have a network of second-story piazzas, and the rooms were very much shadowed and delightfully cool. Mr. Browning was shining in the shadow, by the temperate brightness of mind alone, and ever talking merrily. Cultivated English folk are endowed with sounding gayety of voice, but he surpassed them all, as the medley of his rushing thought and the glorious cheer of his perception would suggest. Mrs. Browning was there: so you knew by her heavy dark curls and white cheeks, but doubted, nevertheless, when you came to meet her great eyes, so dreamy that you wondered which was alive, you or she. Her hand, usually held up to her cheek, was absolutely ghostlike. Her form was so small, and deeply imbedded in a reclining-chair or couch-corner, that it amounted to nothing. The dead Galileo could not possibly have had a wiser or more doubtfully attested being as a neighbor. If the poor scientist had been there to assert that Mrs. Browning breathed, he would probably have been imprisoned forthwith by another incredulous generation. My mother speaks, on her second visit to Rome, of the refreshment of Mr. Browning's calls, and says that the sudden meetings with him gave her weary nerves rest during the strain of my sister's illness. She could not have rejoiced in his spirited loveliness more than the little girl by her side, who sometimes languished for direct personal intercourse in all the panorama of pictures and statues, and friends absorbed in sight-seeing. I had learned to be grateful for art and ruins, if only they were superlative of their kind. I put away a store of such in my fancy. But Mr. Browning was a perfection which looked at me, and moved vigorously! For many years he associated himself in my mind with the blessed visions that had enriched my soul in Italy, and continued to give it sustenance in the loneliness of my days when we again threw ourselves upon the inartistic mercies of a New England village. He grouped himself with a lovely Diana at the Vatican, with some of Raphael's Madonnas and the statue of Perseus, with Beatrice Cenci and the wildflowers of our journeys by vettura, besides a few other faultless treasures deeply appreciated by me. We all noticed Mr. Browning's capacity for springing through substances and covering space without the assistance of time.
My mother says in her little diary of Rome, “I met Mr. Browning; or rather, he rushed at me from a distance, and seemed to come through a carriage in his way.” It was as if he longed to teach people how to follow his thoughts in poetry, as they flash electrically from one spot to another, thinking nothing of leaping to a mountain-top from an inspection of “callow nestlings,” or any other tender fact of smallest interest. Not one of all the cherubs of the great masters had a sunnier face, more dancing curls, or a sweeter smile than he. The most present personality was his; the most distant, even when near, was the personality he married. I have wondered whether the Faun would have sprung with such untainted jollity into the sorrows of to-day if Mr. Browning had not leaped so blithely before my father's eyes. “Browning's nonsense,” he writes, “is of a very genuine and excellent quality, the true babble and effervescence of a bright and powerful mind; and he lets it play 'among his friends with the faith and simplicity of a child.”
I think I must be right in tracing one of the chief enchantments of the story of Dr. Grimshawe to these months upon the hill of Bellosguardo. For at Montauto one of the terrors was the cohort of great spiders. There is no word in the dictionary so large or so menacing as a large spider of the Dr. Grimshawe kind. Such appear, like exclamations, all over the world. I saw one as huge and thrilling as these Italian monsters on the Larch Path at the Wayside, a few years later; but at Montauto they really swaggered and remained. We perceive such things from a great distance, as all disaster may be perceived if we are not more usefully employed. A presentiment whispers, “There he is!” and looking unswervingly in the right direction, there he is, to be sure. I could easily have written a poor story, though not a good novel, upon the effectiveness of these spiders, glaring in the chinks of bed-curtains, or moving like shadows upon the chamber wall or around the windows, and I can guess my father's amusement over them. They were as large as plums, with numerous legs that spread and brought their personality out to the verge of impossibility. I suppose they stopped there, but I am not sure. No wonder the romancer humorously added a touch that made a spider of the doctor himself, with his vast web of pipe-smoke!
The great romance of “Monte Beni” is thus referred to by Mr. Motley and his wife; I give a few sentences written by the latter, a friend of many years' standing, and I insert Mr. Motley's letter entire: —
WALTON-ON-THAMES, April 13, 1860.
DEAREST SOPHIA, — My pen continues to be the same instrument of torture to me that you remember it always was in my youth, when I used to read your letters with such wonder and delight. This spell is still upon me, for I appreciate the magic of your mind now as much as I did then, and have treasured up every little bit of a note that you wrote me in Rome. I like your fresh feminine enthusiasm, and always feel better and happier under its influence. . . . I am glad that you were so much pleased with Lothrop's letter of praise and thanksgiving; a poor return at best for the happiness we had derived from reading Mr. Hawthorne's exquisite romance. . . . I shall not now attempt to add any poor words of mine to his expressive ones, except to assure you of my deep sympathy for the infinite content and joy you must feel in this new expression of your husband's genius. We were so much pleased to find that he was willing to come to us in London, which we hardly dared to hope for. . . . At least I can promise to attend to him as little as possible. . . . We have taken for the season a small house in Hertford Street, 31, which belong
s to Lady Byron, who has fitted it up for her grand-daughter, Lady Annabella King. . . . The eldest brother, Lord Ockham, is a mechanic, and is now working in a machine-shop in Blackwall Island, where he lives. This eccentric course is rather, I fear, the development of a propensity for low company and pursuits than from anything Peter the Greatish there is about him. His father, who is the quintessence of aristocracy, has cast him off. . . . Lothrop was very much gratified by all the fine things you said about him, and so was I; for praise from you means something and is worth having, because it comes from the heart. There is another volume written, . . . but another must be written before either is published.
Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated) Page 688