CHAPTER I.
THE RETREAT.
I ARRIVED at St. Petersburg, and found the Czarina, whose conjugalperfidy was more than suspected, tolerably resigned to the extinctionof that dazzling life whose incalculable and god-like utility it isreserved for posterity to appreciate! I have observed, by the way, thatin general men are the less mourned by their families in proportionas they are the more mourned by the community. The great are seldomamiable; and those who are the least lenient to our errors areinvariably our relations!
Many circumstances at that time conspired to make my request to quit theimperial service appear natural and appropriate. The death of the Czar,joined to a growing jealousy and suspicion between the English monarchand Russia, which, though long existing, was now become more evident andnotorious than heretofore, gave me full opportunity to observe that mypardon had been obtained from King George three years since, and thatprivate as well as national ties rendered my return to England a measurenot only of expediency but necessity. The imperial Catherine grantedme my dismissal in the most flattering terms, and added the highdistinction of the Order founded in honour of the memorable feat bywhich she had saved her royal consort and the Russian army to the Orderof St. Andrew, which I had already received.
I transferred my wealth, now immense, to England, and, with the pompwhich became the rank and reputation Fortune had bestowed upon me, Icommenced the long land-journey I had chalked out to myself. AlthoughI had alleged my wish to revisit England as the main reason of myretirement from Russia, I had also expressed an intention of visitingItaly previous to my return to England. The physicians, indeed, hadrecommended to me that delicious climate as an antidote to the ills myconstitution had sustained in the freezing skies of the north; and in myown heart I had secretly appointed some more solitary part of the DivineLand for the scene of my purposed hermitage and seclusion. It is indeedastonishing how those who have lived much in cold climates yearn forlands of mellow light and summer luxuriance; and I felt for a southernsky the same resistless longing which sailors, in the midst of thevast ocean, have felt for the green fields and various landscape of theshore.
I traversed, then, the immense tracts of Russia, passed through Hungary,entered Turkey, which I had wished to visit, where I remained a shorttime; and, crossing the Adriatic, hailed, for the first time, theAusonian shore. It was the month of May--that month, of whose lustrousbeauty none in a northern clime can dream--that I entered Italy. It mayserve as an instance of the power with which a thought that, howeverimportant, is generally deemed of too abstract and metaphysical a naturedeeply to engross the mind, possessed me then, that I--no cold norunenthusiastic votary of the classic Muse--made no pilgrimage to cityor ruin, but, after a brief sojourn at Ravenna, where I dismissed all mytrain, set out alone to find the solitary cell for which I now sickenedwith a hermit's love.
It was at a small village at the foot of the Apennines that I foundthe object of my search. Strangely enough, there blended with myphilosophical ardour a deep mixture of my old romance. Nature, to whosevoice the dweller in cities and struggler with mankind had been so longobtuse, now pleaded audibly at my heart, and called me to her embraces,as a mother calls unto her wearied child. My eye, as with a new vision,became open to the mute yet eloquent loveliness of this most fairyearth; and hill and valley, the mirror of silent waters, the sunnystillness of woods, and the old haunts of satyr and nymph, revived in methe fountains of past poetry, and became the receptacles of a thousandspells, mightier than the charms of any enchanter save Love, whichwas departed,--Youth, which was nearly gone,--and Nature, which (morevividly than ever) existed for me still.
I chose, then, my retreat. As I was fastidious in its choice, I cannotrefrain from the luxury of describing it. Ah, little did I dream that Ihad come thither, not only to find a divine comfort but the sources ofa human and most passionate woe! Mightiest of the Roman bards! in whomtenderness and reason were so entwined, and who didst sanctify eventhine unholy errors with so beautiful and rare a genius! what aninvariable truth one line of thine has expressed: "Even in the fairestfountain of delight there is a secret and evil spring eternally bubblingup and scattering its bitter waters over the very flowers which surroundits margin!"
In the midst of a lovely and tranquil vale was a small cottage; thatwas my home. The good people there performed for me all the hospitableoffices I required. At a neighbouring monastery I had taken theprecaution to make myself known to the superior. Not all Italians--no,nor all monks--belong to either of the two great tribes into which theyare generally divided,--knaves or fools. The Abbot Anselmo was a man ofrather a liberal and enlarged mind; he not only kept my secret, whichwas necessary to my peace, but he took my part, which was perhapsnecessary to my safety. A philosopher, who desires only to convincehimself, and upon one subject, does not require many books. Truth liesin a small compass; and for my part, in considering any speculativesubject, I would sooner have with me one book of Euclid as a model thanall the library of the Vatican as authorities. But then I am not fond ofdrawing upon any resources but those of reason for reasonings: wisermen than I am are not so strict. The few books that I did require were,however, of a nature very illicit in Italy; the good Father passed themto me from Ravenna, under his own protection. "I was a holy man," hesaid, "who wished to render the Catholic Church a great service, bywriting a vast book against certain atrocious opinions; and the works Iread were, for the most part, works that I was about to confute." Thisreport gained me protection and respect; and, after I had ordered myagent at Ravenna to forward to the excellent Abbot a piece of plate, anda huge cargo of a rare Hungary wine, it was not the Abbot's fault if Iwas not the most popular person in the neighbourhood.
But to my description: my home was a cottage; the valley in which it laywas divided by a mountain stream, which came from the forest Apennine,a sparkling and wild stranger, and softened into quiet and calm as itproceeded through its green margin in the vale. And that margin, howdazzlingly green it was! At the distance of about a mile from my hut,the stream was broken into a slight waterfall, whose sound was hearddistinct and deep in that still place; and often I paused, from mymidnight thoughts, to listen to its enchanted and wild melody. Thefall was unseen by the ordinary wanderer, for, there, the stream passedthrough a thick copse; and even when you pierced the grove, and gainedthe water-side, dark trees hung over the turbulent wave, and the silverspray was thrown upward through the leaves, and fell in diamonds uponthe deep green sod.
This was a most favoured haunt with me: the sun glancing through theidle leaves; the music of the water; the solemn absence of all othersounds, except the songs of birds, to which the ear grew accustomed,and, at last, in the abstraction of thought, scarcely distinguished fromthe silence; the fragrant herbs; and the unnumbered and namelessflowers which formed my couch,--were all calculated to make me pursueuninterruptedly the thread of contemplation which I had, in the lessvoluptuous and harsher solitude of the closet, first woven from the webof austerest thought. I say pursue, for it was too luxurious andsensual a retirement for the conception of a rigid and severe train ofreflection; at least it would have been so to me. But when the thought_is once born_, such scenes seem to me the most fit to cradle and torear it. The torpor of the physical appears to leave to the mentalframe a full scope and power; the absence of human cares, sounds, andintrusions, becomes the best nurse to contemplation; and even thatdelicious and vague sense of enjoyment which would seem, at first, moregenial to the fancy than the mind, preserves the thought undisturbedbecause contented; so that all but the scheming mind becomes lappedin sleep, and the mind itself lives distinct and active as a dream,--adream, not vague nor confused nor unsatisfying, but endowed with morethan the clearness, the precision, the vigour, of waking life.
A little way from this waterfall was a fountain, a remnant of a classicand golden age. Never did Naiad gaze on a more glassy mirror, or dwellin a more divine retreat. Through a crevice in an overhanging mound ofthe emerald earth, the father stream of the
fountain crept out, born,like Love, among flowers, and in the most sunny smiles; it then fell,broadening and glowing, into a marble basin, at whose bottom, in theshining noon, you might see a soil which mocked the very hues of gold,and the water insects, in their quaint shapes and unknown sports,grouping or gliding in the mid-most wave. A small temple of the lightestarchitecture stood before the fountain, and in a niche therein amutilated statue,--possibly of the Spirit of the place. By this fountainmy evening walk would linger till the short twilight melted away andthe silver wave trembled in the light of the western star. Oh, then whatfeelings gathered over me as I turned slowly homeward! the air still,breathless, shining; the stars gleaming over the woods of the farApennine; the hills growing huger in the shade; the small insectshumming on the wing; and, ever and anon, the swift bat, wheeling roundand amidst them; the music of the waterfall deepening on the ear; andthe light and hour lending even a mysterious charm to the cry of theweird owl, flitting after its prey,--all this had a harmony in mythoughts and a food for the meditations in which my days and nights wereconsumed. The World moulders away the fabric of our early nature, andSolitude rebuilds it on a firmer base.