by Mary Shelley
The sun shone on the town of Henley upon Thames. The inhabitants, meeting one another, exclaimed: “What enchanting weather! It has not rained these two days; and, as the moon does not change till Monday, we shall perhaps enjoy a whole week of sunshine!” Thus they congratulated themselves, and thus also I thought as, with the Eclogues of Virgil in my pocket, I walked out to enjoy one of the best gifts of heaven, a rainless, windless, cloudless day. The country around Henley is well calculated to attune to gentlest modulations the rapturous emotions to which the balmy, ambient air, gave birth in my heart. The Thames glides through grassy slopes, and its banks are sometimes shaded by beechwood, and sometimes open to the full glare of the sun. Near the spot towards which I wandered several beautiful islands are formed in the river, covered with willows, poplars, and elms. The trees of these islands unite their branches with those of the firm land, and form a green archway which numerous birds delight to frequent. I entered a park belonging to a noble mansion; the grass was fresh and green; it had been mown a short time before; and, springing up again, was softer than the velvet on which the Princess Badroulboudour walked to Aladdin’s palace. I sat down under a majestic oak by the river’s side; I drew out my book and began to read the Eclogue of Silenus.
A sigh breathed near me caught my attention. How could an emotion of pain exist in a human breast at such a time. But when I looked up I perceived that it was a sigh of rapture, not of sorrow. It arose from a feeling that, finding no words by which it might express itself, clothed its burning spirit in a sigh. I well knew the person who stood beside me; it was Edmund Malville, a man young in soul, though he had passed through more than half the way allotted for man’s journey. His countenance was pale; when in a quiescent state it appeared heavy; but let him smile, and Paradise seemed to open on his lips; let him talk, and his dark blue eyes brightened, the mellow tones of his voice trembled with the weight of feeling with which they were laden; and his slight, insignificant person seemed to take the aspect of an ethereal substance (if I may use the expression), and to have too little of clay about it to impede his speedy ascent to heaven. The curls of his dark hair rested upon his clear brow, yet unthinned.
Such was the appearance of Edmund Malville, a man whom I reverenced and loved beyond expression. He sat down beside me, and we entered into conversation on the weather, the river, Parry’s voyage, and the Greek revolution. But our discourse dwindled into silence; the sun declined; the motion of the fleckered shadow of the oak tree, as it rose and fell, stirred by a gentle breeze; the passage of swallows, who dipt their wings into the stream as they flew over it; the spirit of love and life that seemed to pervade the atmosphere, and to cause the tall grass to tremble beneath its presence; all these objects formed the links of a chain that bound up our thoughts in silence.
Idea after idea passed through my brain; and at length I exclaimed, why or wherefore I do not remember,—”Well, at least this clear stream is better than the muddy Arno.”
Malville smiled. I was sorry that I had spoken; for he loved Italy, its soil, and all that it contained, with a strange enthusiasm. But, having delivered my opinion, I was bound to support it, and I continued: “Well, my dear friend, I have also seen the Arno, so I have some right to judge. I certainly was never more disappointed with any place than with Italy — that is to say, taken all in all. The shabby villas; the yellow Arno; the bad taste of the gardens, with their cropped trees and deformed statues; the suffocating scirocco; the dusty roads; their ferries over their broad, uninteresting rivers, or their bridges crossing stones over which water never flows; that dirty Brenta (the New River Cut is an Oronooko to it); and Venice, with its uncleaned canals and narrow lanes, where Scylla and Charybdis meet you at every turn; and you must endure the fish and roasted pumpkins at the stalls, or the smell—”
“Stop, blasphemer!” cried Malville, half angry, half laughing, “I give up the Brenta; but Venice, the Queen of the sea, the city of gondolas and romance—”
“Romance, Malville, on those ditches?—”
“Yes, indeed, romance! — genuine and soul-elevating romance! Do you not bear in mind the first view of the majestic city from Fusina, crowning the sea with Cybele’s diadem? How well do I remember my passage over, as with breathless eagerness I went on the self-same track which the gondolas of the fearless Desdemona, the loving Moor, the gentle Belvidera, and brave Pierre, had traced before me; they still seemed to inhabit the palaces that thronged on each side, and I figured them to myself gliding near, as each dark, mysterious gondola passed by me. How deeply implanted in my memory is every circumstance of my little voyage home from the opera each night along what you call ditches; when sitting in one of those luxurious barks, matched only by that which bore Cleopatra to her Antony, all combined to raise and nourish romantic feeling. The dark canal, shaded by the black houses; the melancholy splash of the oar; the call, or rather chaunt made by the boat-men, ‘Ca Stall!’ (the words themselves delightfully unintelligible) to challenge any other bark as we turned a corner; the passing of another gondola, black as night and silent as death — Is not this romantic? Then we emerged into the wide expanse before the Place of St. Mark; the cupolas of the church of Santa Maria de la Salute were silvered by the moonbeams; the dark tower rose in silent majesty; the waves rippled; and the dusty line of Lido afar off was the pledge of calm and safety. The Paladian palaces that rose from the Canale Grande; the simple beauty of the Rialto’s single arch—”
“Horrible place! I shall never forget crossing it—”
“Ay, that is the way with you of this world. But who among those who love romance ever thinks of going on the Rialto when they have once heard that the fish-market is held there? No place, trust an adept, equals Venice in giving a local habitation and a name,’ to the restless imaginations of those who pant to quit the ‘painted scene of this new world—’f for the old world, peopled by sages who have lived in material shape, and heroes whose existence is engendered in the mind of man alone. I have often repeated this to myself as I passed the long hours of the silent night watching the far lights of the distant gondolas, and listening to the chaunt of the boatmen as they glided under my window. How quiet is Venice! no horses; none of the hideous sounds and noises of a town. I grant that in lanes — but why talk of what belongs to every town; dirty alleys, troublesome market-women, and the mark of a maritime city, the luckless smell of fish? Why select defects, and cast from your account the peculiar excellencies of this wonderful city? The buildings rising from the waves; the silence of the watery pavement; the mysterious beauty of the black gondolas; and, not to be omitted, the dark eyes and finely-shaped brows of the women peeping from beneath their fazioles.
“You were three months in Italy?”
“Six, if you please, Malville.”
“Well, six, twelve, twenty, are not sufficient to learn to appreciate Italy. We go with false notions of God knows what — of orange groves and fields of asphodel; we expect what we do not find, and are therefore disappointed with the reality; and yet to my mind the reality is not inferior to any scene of enchantment that the imagination ever conjured.”
“Or rather say, my friend, that the imagination can paint objects of little worth in gaudy colours, and then become enamoured of its own work.”
“Shall I tell you,” continued Malville, with a smile, “how you passed your time in Italy? You traversed the country in your travelling chariot, cursing the postillions and the bad inns. You arrived at a town and went to the best hotel, at which you found many of your countrymen, mere acquaintances in England, but hailed as bosom friends in that strange land. You walked about the streets of a morning expecting to find gorgeous temples and Cyclopean ruins in every street in Florence; you came to some broken pillar, wondered what it could be, and laughed at the idea of this being one of the relics which your wise countrymen came so far to see; you lounged into a coffee-house and read Galignani; and then perhaps wandered with equal apathy into the gallery, where, if you were not transport
ed to the seventh heaven, I can undertake your defence no further.”
“My defence, Malville?”
“You dined; you went to a conversazione, where you were neither understood nor could understand; you went to the opera to hear probably the fifty-second repetition of a piece to which nobody listened; or you found yourself in Paradise at the drawing-room of the English ambassador, and fancied yourself in Grosvenor-square.
“I am a lover of nature. Towns, and the details of mixed society, are modes of life alien to my nature. I live to myself and to my affections, and nothing to that tedious routine which makes up the daily round of most men’s lives. I went to Italy young, and visited with ardent curiosity and delight all of great and glorious which that country contains. I have already mentioned the charms which Venice has for me; and all Lombardy, whose aspect indeed is very different from that of the south of Italy, is beautiful in its kind. Among the lakes of the north we meet with alpine scenery mixed with the more luxuriant vegetation of the south. The Euganean hills in gentler beauty remind one of the hills of our own country, yet painted with warmer colours. Read Ugo Foscolo’s description of them in the first part of his ‘Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis,’ and you will acknowledge the romantic and even sublime sentiments which they are capable of inspiring. But Naples is the real enchantress of Italy; the scenery there is so exquisitely lovely, the remains of antiquity so perfect, wondrous, and beautiful; the climate so genial, that a festive appearance seems for ever to invest it, mingled strangely with the feeling of insecurity with which one is inspired by the sight of Vesuvius, and the marks which are every where manifest of the violent changes that have taken place in that of which in other countries we feel most certain, good Mother Earth herself. With us this same dame is a domestic wife, keeping house, and providing with earnest care and yet penurious means for her family, expecting no pleasure, and finding no amusement. At Naples my fair lady tricks herself out in rich attire, she is kept in the best humour through the perpetual attentions of her constant cavaliere servente, the sun — and she smiles so sweetly on us that we forgive her if at times she plays the coquette with us and leaves us in the lurch. Rome is still the queen of the world, —
All that Athens ever brought forth wise,
All that Afric ever brought forth strange,
All that which Asia ever had of prize,
Was here to see; — O, marvellous great change!
Rome living was the world’s sole ornament,
And dead is now the world’s sole monument.
“If this be true, our forefathers have, in faith! a rare mausoleum for their decay, and Artemisia built a far less costly repository for her lord than widowed Time has bestowed on his dead companion, the Past; when I die may I sleep there and mingle with the glorious dust of Rome! May its radiant atmosphere enshroud these lifeless limbs, and my fading clay give birth to flowers that may inhale that brightest air.
“So I have made my voyage in that fair land, and now bring you to Tuscany. After all I have said of the delights of the south of Italy I would choose Tuscany for a residence. Its inhabitants are courteous and civilized. I confess that there is a charm for me in the manners of the common people and servants. Perhaps this is partly to be accounted for from the contrast which they form with those of my native country; and all that is unusual, by divesting common life of its familiar garb, gives an air of gala to everyday concerns. These good people are courteous, and there is much piquance in the shades of distinction which they make between respect and servility, ease of address and impertinence. Yet this is little seen and appreciated among their English visitors. I have seen a countrywoman of some rank much shocked at being cordially embraced in a parting scene from her cook-maid; and an Englishman think himself insulted because when, on ordering his coachman to wait a few minutes for orders, the man quietly sat down: yet neither of these actions were instigated by the slightest spirit of insolence. I know not why, but there was always something heartfelt and delightful to me in the salutation that passes each evening between master and servant. On bringing the lights the servant always says, ‘Felicissima sera, Signoria;’ and is answered by a similar benediction. These are nothings, you will say; but such nothings have conduced more to my pleasure than other events usually accounted of more moment.
“The country of Tuscany is cultivated and fertile, although it does not bear the same stamp of excessive luxury as in the south. To continue my half-forgotten simile, the earth is here like a young affectionate wife, who loves her home, yet dresses that home in smiles. In spring, nature arises in beauty from her prison, and rains sunbeams and life upon the land. Summer comes up in its green array, giving labour and reward to the peasants. Their plenteous harvests, their Virgilian threshing floors, and looks of busy happiness, are delightful to me. The balmy air of night, Hesperus in his glowing palace of sunlight, the flower-starred earth, the glittering waters, the ripening grapes, the chestnut copses, the cuckoo, and the nightingale, — such is the assemblage which is to me what balls and parties are to others. And if a storm come, rushing like an armed band over the country, filling the torrents, bending the proud heads of the trees, causing the clouds’ deafening music to resound, and the lightning to fill the air with splendour; I am still enchanted by the spectacle which diversifies what I have heard named the monotonous blue skies of Italy.
“In Tuscany the streams are fresh and full, the plains decorated with waving corn, shadowed by trees and trellised vines, and the mountains arise in woody majesty behind to give dignity to the scene. What is a land without mountains? Heaven disdains a plain; but when the beauteous earth raises her proud head to seek its high communion, then it descends to meet her, it adorns her in clouds, and invests her in radiant hues.
“On the 15th of September, 18 — , I remember being one of a party of pleasure from the baths of Pisa to Vico Pisano, a little town formerly a frontier fortress between the Pisan and Florentine territories. The air inspired joy, and the pleasure I felt I saw reflected in the countenance of my beloved companions. Our course lay beneath hills hardly high enough for the name of mountains, but picturesquely shaped and covered with various wood. The cicale chirped, and the air was impregnated with the perfume of flowers. We passed the Rupe de Noce, and proceeding still at the foot of hills arrived at Vico Pisano, which is built at the extreme point of the range. The houses are old and surmounted with ancient towers; and at one end of the town there is a range of old wall, weed-grown; but never did eye behold hues more rich and strange than those with which time and the seasons have painted this relic. The lines of the cornice swept downwards, and made a shadow that served even to diversify more the colours we beheld. We returned along the same road; and not far from Vico Pisano ascended a gentle hill, at the top of which was a church dedicated to Madonna, with a grassy platform of earth before it. Here we spread and ate our rustic fare, and were waited upon by the peasant girls of the cottage attached to the church, one of whom was of extreme beauty, a beauty heightened by the grace of her motions and the simplicity of her manner. After our pic-nic we reposed under the shade of the church, on the brow of the hill. We gazed on the scene with rapture. ‘Look,’ cried my best, and now lost friend, ‘behold the mountains that sweep into the plain like waves that meet in a chasm; the olive woods are as green as a sea, and are waving in the wind; the shadows of the clouds are spotting the bosoms of the hills; a heron comes sailing over us; a butterfly flits near; at intervals the pines give forth their sweet and prolonged response to the wind, the myrtle bushes are in bud, and the soil beneath us is carpeted with odoriferous flowers.’ — My full heart could only sigh, he alone was eloquent enough to clothe his thoughts in language.”
Malville’s eyes glistened as he spoke, he sighed deeply; then turning away, he walked towards the avenue that led from the grounds on which we were. I followed him, but we neither of us spoke; and when at length he renewed the conversation, he did not mention Italy; he seemed to wish to turn the current of his thoughts,
and by degrees he reassumed his composure.
When I took leave of him I said, smiling, “You have celebrated an Italian party of pleasure; may I propose an English one to you? Will you join some friends next Thursday in an excursion down the Thames? Perhaps the sight of its beautiful banks, and the stream itself, will inspire you with some of the delight you have felt in happier climes.”
Malville consented. But dare I tell the issue of my invitation? Thursday came, and the sky was covered with clouds; it looked like rain. However, we courageously embarked, and within an hour a gentle mizzling commenced. We made an awning of sails, and wrapt ourselves up in boat-cloaks and shawls. “It is not much,” cried one, with a sigh. “I do not think it will last,” remarked another, in a despairing voice. A silence ensued. “Can you contrive to shelter me at this corner?” said one; “my shoulder is getting wet.” In about five minutes another observed, that the water was trickling in his neck. Yet we went on. The rain ceased for a few minutes, and we tethered our boat in a small cove under dripping trees; we ate our collation, and raised our spirits with wine, so that we were able to endure with tolerable fortitude the heavy rain that accompanied us as we slowly proceeded homewards up the river.