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MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS.
THE
REVENGE OF THE SIGNOR BASIL.
1. PART I.
“Un homme capable de faire des dominos av ec les os de son pere.”
Pere Goriot.
It was in the golden month of August, not very long
ago, that the steamer which plies between St. Mark's
Stairs, at Venice, and the river into which Phaeton
turned a somerset with the horses of the Sun, started
on its course over the lagoon with an unusual Godsend
of passengers. The moon was rising from the
unchaste bed of the Adriatic, (wedded every year to
Venice, yet every day and night sending the sun and
moon from her lovely bosom to the sky,) and while the
gold of the west was still glowing on the landward side
of the Campanile, a silver gleam was brightening momently
on the other, and the Arabic domes of St.
Marc and the flying Mercury on the Dogana paled to
the setting orb and kindled to the rising with the same
Talleyrand-esque facility.
For the first hour the Mangia-foco sputtered on her
way with a silent company; the poetry of the scene,
or the regrets at leaving the delicious city lessening in
the distance, affecting all alike with a thoughtful incommunicativeness.
over the Brenta faded away—the marble city sank into
the sea, with its turrets and bright spires—the still lagoon
became a sheet of polished glass—and the silent
groups leaning over the rails found tongues and feet,
and began to stir and murmur.
With the usual unconscious crystallization of society,
the passengers of the Mangia-foco had yielded
one side of the deck to a party of some rank, who had
left their carriages at Ferrara in coming from Florence
to Venice, and were now upon their return to the city
of Tasso, stomaching, with what grace they might, the
contact of a vulgar conveyance, which saved them the
hundred miles of posting between Ferrara and the
Brenta. In the centre of the aristocratic circle stood
a lady enveloped in a cashmere, but with her bonnet
hung by the string over her arm—one of those women
of Italy upon whom the divinest gifts of loveliness are
showered with a profusion which apparently improverishes
the sex of the whole nation. A beautiful woman
in that land is rarely met; but when she does appear,
she is what Venus would have been after the contest
for beauty on Ida, had the weapons of her antagonists,
as in the tournaments of chivalry, been added to the
palm of victory. The Marchesa del Marmore was apparently
twenty-three, and she might have been an incarnation
of the morning-star for pride and brightness.
On the other side of the deck stood a group of young
men, who, by their careless and rather shabby dress,
but pale and intellectual faces, were of that class met
in every public conveyance of Italy.—The portfolios
under their arms, ready for a sketch, would have removed
a doubt of their profession, had one existed;
and with that proud independence for which the class
is remarkable, they had separated themselves equally
from the noble and ignoble—disqualified by inward superiority
from association with the one, and by accidental
them upon the other. Their glances at the divine face
turned toward them from the party I have alluded to,
were less constant than those of the vulgar, who could
not offend; but they were evidently occupied more
with it than with the fishing-boats lying asleep on the
lagoon; and one of them, half-buried in the coil of
rope, and looking under the arm of another, had already
made a sketch of her that might some day make
the world wonder from what Seventh Heaven of fancy
such an angelic vision of a head had descended upon
the painter's dream.
In the rear of this group, with the air of one who
would conceal himself from view, stood a young man
who belonged to the party, but who, with less of the
pallor of intellectual habits in his face, was much better
dressed than his companions, and had, in spite of
the portfolio under his arm, and a hat of the Salvator
breadth of rim, the undisguisable air of a person accustomed
to the best society. While maintaining a
straggling conversation with his friends, with whom he
seemed a favorite, Signor Basil employed himself in
looking over the sketch of the lovely Marchesa going
on at his elbow, occasionally as if to compare it with
the original, stealing a long look from between his
hand and his slouched hat at the radiant creature sitting
so unconsciously for her picture, and in a low
voice correcting, as by the result of his gaze, the rapid
touches of the artist.
“Take a finer pencil for the nostril, caro mio!” said
he; “it is as thin as the edge of a violet, and its transparent
curve---—”
“Cospetto!” said the youth; “but you see by this
faint light better than I; if she would but turn to the
moon------”
The Signor Basil suddenly flung his handkerchief
into the lagoon, bringing its shadow between the Queen
from her reverie by the passing object, the lady
moved her head quickly to the light, and in that
moment the spirited lip and nostril were transferred to
the painter's sketch.
“Thanks, mio bravo!” enthusiastically exclaimed
the looker on; “Giorgione would not have beaten
thee with the crayon!” and with a rudeness which
surprised the artist, he seized the paper from beneath
his hand, walked away with it to the stern, and leaning
far over the rails, perused it fixedly by the mellow
lustre of the moon. The youth presently followed
him, and after a few words exchanged in an undertone,
Signor Basil slipped a piece of gold into his
hand, and carefully placed the sketch in his own portfolio.
2. II.
It was toward midnight when the Mangia-foco entered
the Adige, and keeping its steady way between
the low banks of the river, made for the grass-grown
and flowery canal which connects its waters with the
Po. Most of the passengers had yielded to the drowsy
influence of the night air, and, of the aristocratic party
on the larboard side, the young Marchesa, alone was
waking; her friends had made couches of their cloaks
and baggage, and were reclining at her feet, while the
artists, all except the Signor Basil, were stretched fairly
on the deck, their portfolios beneath their heads,
and their large hats covering their faces from the powerful
rays of the moon.
“Miladi does justice to the beauty of the night,”
said the waking artist, in a low and respectful tone,
as he rose from her with a cluster of tuberoses she
had let fall from her hand.
“It is indeed lovely, Signor pittore,” responded the
Marchesa, glancing at his portfolio, and receiving the
Venice from the lagoon to-night?”
The Signor Basil opened his portfolio, and replied
to the indirect request of the lady by showing her a
very indifferent sketch of Venice from the island of St.
Lazzaro. As if to escape from the necessity of praising
what had evidently disappointed her, she turned the
cartoon hastily, and exposed, on the sheet beneath, the
spirited and admirable outline of her own matchless
features.
A slight start alone betrayed the surmise of the high-born
lady, and raising the cartoon to examine it more
closely, she said with a smile, “You may easier tread
on Titian's heels than Canaletti's. Bezzuoli has painted
me, and not so well. I will awake the Marquis,
and he shall purchase it of you.”
“Not for the wealth of the Medici, Madam!” said
the young man, clasping his portfolio hastily, “pray do
not disturb Monsignore! The picture is dear to me!”
The Marchesa looking into his face, and with a
glance around, which the aceomplished courtier before
her read better than she dreamed, she drew her shawl
over her blanched shoulders, and settled herself to listen
to the conversation of her new acquaintance.
“You would be less gracious if you were observed,
proud beauty,” thought Basil: “but while you think
the poor painter may while away the tediousness of a
vigil, he may feed his eye on your beauty as well.”
The Mangia-foco turned into the canal, threaded
its lily-paved waters for a mile or two, and then, putting
forth upon the broad bosom of the Po, went on
her course against the stream, and, with retarded pace,
penetrated toward the sun-beloved heart of Italy. And
while the later hours performed their procession with
the stars, the Marchesa del Marmore leaned sleepless
and unfatigued against the railing, listening with mingled
curiosity and scorn to the passionate love-murmur
his fair and curling locks were flowing in the night air,
his form was bent earnestly but respectfully towards
her, and on its lip, with all its submissive tenderness,
there sat a shadow of something she could not define,
but which rebuked ever and anon, as with the fierce
regard of a noble, the condescension she felt towards
him as an artist.
3. III.
Upon the lofty dome of the altar in the cathedral of
Bologna stands poised an angel in marble, not spoken
of in the books of travelers, but perhaps the loveliest
incarnation of a blessed cherub that ever lay in the
veined bosom of Pentelicus. Lost and unobserved on
the vast floor of the nave, the group of artists, who had
made a day's journey from Ferrara, sat in the wicker
chairs hired for a baioch the vesper, and drew silently
from this angel, while the devout people of Bologna
murmured their Ave Marias around. Signor Basil
alone was content to look over the work of his companions,
and the twilight had already begun to brighten
the undying lamps at the shrine, when he started from
the pillar against which he leaned, and crossed hastily
toward a group issuing from a private chapel in the
western aisle. A lady walked between two gentlemen
of noble mien, and behind her, attended by an equally
distinguished company, followed that lady's husband,
the Marchese del Marmore. They were strangers
passing through Bologna, and had been attended to
vespers by some noble friends.
The companions of the Signor Basil looked on with
some surprise as their enamored friend stepped confidently
before the two nobles in attendance upon the
lady, and arrested her steps with a salutation which,
though respectful as became a gentleman, was marked
reception.
“May I congratulate Miladi,” he said, rising slowly
from his bow, and fixing his eyes with unembarrassed
admiration on her own liquid but now frowning orbs,
upon her safe journey over the Marches. “Bologna,”
he continued, glancing at the nobles with a courteous
smile, “welcomes her fittingly.”
The lady listened with a look of surprise, and the
Bolognese glanced from the dusty boots of the artist to
his portfolio.
“Has the painter the honor to know La Signora?”
asked the cavalier on her right.
“Signor, si!” said the painter, fiercely, as a curl
arched the lady's lip, and she prepared to answer.
The color mounted to the temples of the Marchesa,
and her hushand, who had loitered beneath the Madonna
of Domenichino, coming up at the instant, she
bowed coldly to the Signor Basil, and continued down
the aisle. The artist followed to her carriage, and
lifted his hat respectfully as the lumbering equipage took
its way by the famous statue of Neptune, and then with
a confident smile, which seemed to his companions
somewhat mistimed, he muttered between his teeth,
“Ciascuno son bel' giorno!” and strolled loitering on
with them to the trattoria.
4. IV.
The court of the Grand Duke of Florence is perhaps
the most cosmopolitan and the most easy of access
in all Europe. The Austrian-born Monarch himself,
adopting in some degree the frank and joyous
character of the people over whom he reigns, throws
open his parks and palaces, his gardens and galleries,
to the strangers passing through; and, in the season of
gaiety, almost any presentable person, resident at Florence,
may procure the entree to the court balls, and
courtly favor. The fetes at the Palazzo Pitti, albeit not
always exempt from a leaven of vulgarity, are always
brilliant and amusing, and the exclusives of the court,
though they draw the line distinctly enough to their
own eye, mix with apparent abandonment in the motley
waltz and mazurka, and either from good-nature or a
haughty conviction of their superiority, never suffer the
offensive cordon to be felt, scarce to be suspected, by
the multitude who divert them. The Grand Duke, to
common eyes is a grave and rather timid person, with
more of the appearance of the scholar than of the
sovereign, courteous in public, and benevolent and
earnest in his personal attentions to his guests at the
palace. The royal quadrille may be shared without
permission of the grand chamberlain, and the royal eye,
after the first one or two dances of ceremony, searches
for partners by the lamp of beauty, heedless of the diamonds
on the brow, or the star of nobility on the shoulder.
The grand supper is scarce more exclusive, and
on the disappearance of the royal cortege, the delighted
crowd take their departure, having seen no class more
favored than themselves, and enchanted with the gracious
absence of pretension in the nobilita of Tuscany.
Built against the side of a steep hill, the Palazzo
Pitti encloses its rooms of state within massive and
sombre walls in front, while in the rear the higher stories
of the palace open forth on a level with the delicious
gardens of the Boboli, and contain suites of
smaller apartments, fitted up with a cost and luxury
which would beggar the dream of a Sybarite. Here
lives the monarch, in a seclusion rendered deeper and
more sacred by the propinquity of the admitted world
in the apartments below; and in this sanctuary of royalty
is enclosed a tide of life, as silent and unsuspected
by the common inhabitant of Florence, as the flow of
the ocean-veiled Arethusa by the mariner of the Ionian
is exhausted in poetical luxury,—here the reserved and
silent sovereign throws off his maintien of royal condescension,
and enters with equal arms into the lists of
love and wit,—here burn (as if upon an altar fed with
spice-woods and precious gums) the fervent and uncalculating
passions of this glowing clime, in senses refined
by noble nurture, and hearts prompted by the
haughty pulses of noble blood,—and here—to the
threshold of this sanctuary of royal pleasure—press all
who know its secrets, and who imagine a claim to it in
their birth and attractions, while the lascia-passare is
accorded with a difficulty which alone preserves its
splendor.
Some two or three days after the repulse of the
Signor Basil in the cathedral of Bologna, the group of
traveling artists were on their way from the grand gallery
at Florence to their noon-day meal. Loitering
with slow feet through the crowded and narrow Via
Calzaiole, they emerged into the sunny Piazza, and
looking up with understanding eyes at the slender shaft
of the Campanile, (than which a fairer finger of religious
architecture points not to heaven,) they took
their way toward the church of Santa Trinita, proposing
to eat their early dinner at a house named, from its
excellence in a certain temperate beverage, La Birra.
The traveler should be advised also, that by paying an
extra paul in the bottle, he may have at this renowned
eating-house, an old wine sunned on the southern
shoulder of Fiesole, that hath in its flavor a certain redolence
of Boccaccio, scarce remarkable since it grew
in the scene of the Decameron, but of a virtue which,
to the Hundred Tales of Love, (read drinking,) is what
the Gradus ad Parnassum should be to the building of
a dithyrambic. The oil of two crazie upon the palm of
the fat waiter Giuseppe will assist in calling the vintage
to his memory.
A thundering rap upon the gate of the adjoining Palazzo
arrested the attention of the artists as they were
about to enter the Birra, and in the occupant of a dark
green cabriolet, drawn by a pampered horse of the
Duke's breed, they recognised, elegantly dressed and
posed on his seat a la D'Orsay, the Signor Basil. His
coat was of an undecided cut and color, and his gloves
were of primrose purity.
The recognition was immediate, and the cordiality
of the greeting mutual. They had parted from their
companion at the gate of Florence, as travelers part,
without question, and they met without reserve to part
as questionless again. The artists were surprised at
the Signor Basil's transformation, but no follower of
their refined art would have been so ill bred as to express
it. He wished them the bon appetito, as a tall
chasseur came out to say that her ladyship was at
home; and with a slacked rein the fiery horse sprang
through the gateway, and the marble court of the
palace rang with his prancing hoofs.
He who has idled and bought flowers at the Cafe of
the Colonna at Florence will have remarked, as he sat
in his chair upon the street in the sultry evening the
richly ornamented terrace and balustrade of the Palazzo
Corsi giving upon the Piazza Trinita. The dark old
Ghibelline palace of the Strozzi lets the eye down upon
it, as it might pass from a helmeted knight with closed
vizor to his unbonneted and laughing page. The crimson
curtains of the window opening upon the terrace,
at the time of our story, reminded every passing Florentine
of the lady who dwelt within—a descendant of
one of the haughtiest lines of English chivalry—resident
in Italy since many years for health, but bearing
in her delicate frame and exquisitely transparent features,
the loftiest type of patrician beauty that had ever
filled the eye that looked upon her. In the inner heaven
of royal exclusiveness at the Pitti—in its constellation
been the worshipped and ascendant cynosure. Happy
in a husband without rank and but of moderate fortune,
she maintained the spotless character of an English
wife in this sphere of conventional corruption; and
though the idol of the Duke and his nobles, it would
have been like a whisper against the purity of the
brightest Pleiad, to have linked her name with love.
With her feet upon a sofa covered with a gossamer
cashmere, her lovely head pillowed on a cushion of
silk, and a slight stand within arm's length holding a
vase of flowers and the volume from which she had
been reading, the Lady Geraldine received the Count
Basil Spirifort, some time attache to the Russian embassy
at Paris, (where he had first sunned his eyes in
her beauty,) and at present the newly appointed secretary
to the minister of the same monarch near the
court of Tuscany.
Without a bow, but with the hasty step and gesture
of a long absent and favored friend, the Count Basil
ran to the proffered hand, and pressed its alabaster
fingers to his lips. Had the more common acquaintances
of the diplomate seen him at this moment, they
would have marvelled how the mask of manhood may
drop, and disclose the ingenuous features of the boy.
The secretary knew his species, and the Lady Geraldine
was one of those women for whom the soul is unwilling
to possess a secret.
After the first inquiries were over, the lady questioned
her recovered favorite of his history since they
had parted. “I left you,” she said, “swimming the
dangerous tide of life at Paris. How have you come
to shore?”
“Thanks, perhaps, to your friendship, which made
life worth the struggle! For the two extremes, however,
you know what I was at Paris—and yesterday I
was a wandering artist in velveteen and a sombrero!”
Lady Geraldine laughed.
“Ah! you look at my curls—but Macassar is at a
discount! It is the only grace I cherished in my incognito.
A resumer—I got terribly out of love by the
end of the year after we parted, and as terribly in
debt. My promotion in diplomacy did not arrive, and
the extreme hour for my credit did. Pozzo di Borgo
kindly procured me conge for a couple of years, and I
dived presently under a broad-rimmed hat, got into a
vetturino with portfolio and pencils, joined a troop of
wandering artists, and with my patrimony at nurse,
have been two years looking at life witout spectacles
at Venice.”
“And painting?”
“Painting!”
“Might one see a specimen?” asked the Lady Geraldine,
with an incredulous smile.
“I regret that my immortal efforts in oils are in the
possession of a certain Venetian, who lets the fifth floor
of a tenement washed by the narrowest canal in that
fair city. But if your ladyship cares to see a drawing
or two—”
He rang the bell, and his jocki Anglais presently
brought from the pocket of his cabriolet a way-worn
and thinly furnished portfolio. The Lady Geraldine
turned over a half-dozen indifferent views of Venice,
but the last cartoon in the portfolio made her start.
“La Marchesa del Marmore!” she exclaimed, looking
at Count Basil with an inquiring and half uneasy
eye.
“Is it well drawn?” he asked quietly.
“Well drawn? It is a sketch worthy of Raphael.
Do you really draw so well as this, or”—she added,
after a slight hesitation—“is it a miracle of love?”
“It is a divine head,” soliloquized the Russian, half
closing his eyes, and looking at the drawing from a
memory.
The Lady Geraldine laid her hand on his arm. “My
dear Basil,” she said seriously, “I should be wretched
if I thought your happiness was in the power of this
woman. Do you love her?”
“The portrait was not drawn by me,” he answered,
“though I have a reason for wishing her to think so.
It was done by a fellow traveler of mine, whom I wish
to make a sketch of yourself, and I have brought it
here to interest you in him as an artist. Mais revenons
a nos moutons—La Marchesa was also a fellow traveler
of mine, and without loving her too violently, I owe
her a certain debt of courtesy contracted on the way.
Will you assist me to pay it?”
Relieved of her fears, and not at all suspecting the
good faith of the diplomatist in his acknowledgments of
gratitude, the Lady Geraldine inquired simply how she
could serve him.
“In the twenty-four hours since my arrival at Florence,”
he said, “I have put myself, as you will see,
au courant of the minor politics of the Pitti. Thanks
to my Parisian renown, the Duke has enrolled me already
under the back-stairs oligarchy, and to-morrow
night I shall sup with you in the Saloon of Hercules
after the ball is over. La Marchesa, as you well know,
has, with all her rank and beauty, never been able to
set foot within those guarded penetralia—soit her malicious
tongue, soit the interest against her of the men
she has played upon her hook too freely. The road
to her heart, if there be one, lies over that threshold,
and I would take the toll. Do you understand me,
most beautiful Lady Geraldine?”
The Count Basil imprinted another kiss upon the
fingers of the fair Englishwoman, as she promised to
put into his hand the following night the illuminated
ticket which was to repay, as she thought, too generously,
her vase for his bosom, he took his leave to return at
twilight to dinner. Dismissing his cabriolet at the gate,
he turned on foot toward the church of San Gaetano,
and with an expression of unusual elation in his step
and countenance, entered the trattoria, where dined at
that moment his companions of the pencil.
5. V.
The green lamps glittering by thousands amid the
foliage of the Boboli had attained their full brightness,
and the long-lived Italian day had died over the distant
mountains of Carrara, leaving its inheritance of light
apparently to the stars, who, on their fields of deepening
blue, sparkled, each one like the leader of an unseen
host in the depths of heaven, himself the foremost
and the most radaint. The night was balmy and voluptuous.
The music of the Ducal band swelled forth
from the perfumed apartments on the air. A single
nightingale, far back in the wilderness of the garden,
poured from his melodious heart a chant of the most
passionate melancholy. The sentinel of the bodyguard
stationed at the limit of the spray of the fountain
leaned on his halberd and felt his rude senses melt in
the united spells of luxury and nature. The ministers
of a monarch's pleasure had done their utmost to prepare
a scene of royal delight, and night and summer
had flung in their enchantments when ingenuity was
exhausted.
The dark architectural mass of the Pitti, pouring a
blaze of light scarce endurable from its deeply sunk
windows, looked like the side of an enchanted mountain
laid open for the revels of sorcery. The aigrette
and plume passed by; the tiara and the jewel upon
the breast; the gaily dressed courtiers and glittering
dames; and to that soldier at his dewy post, it seemed
like the realized raving of the improvisatore when he
Malice and Hate, and the light and perfume that might
have fed an angel's heart with love, but deepened in
many a beating bosom the consuming fires of Envy.
With the gold key of office on his cape, the Grand
Chamberlain stood at the feet of the Dowager Grand
Duchess, and by a sign to the musicians, hidden in a
latticed gallery behind the Corinthian capital of the
hall, retarded or accelerated the soft measure of the
waltz. On a raised seat in the rear of the chairs of
state, sat the ladies of honor and the noble dames
nearest allied to royal blood; one solitary and privileged
intruder alone sharing the elevated place—the
Lady Geraldine. Dressed in white, her hair wound
about her head in the simplest form, yet developing
its divine shape with the clear outline of statuary, her
eyes lambent with purity and sweetness, heavily fringed
with lashes a shade darker than the light auburn
braided on her temples, and the tint of the summer's
most glowing rose turned out from the thread-like
parting of her lips; she was a vision of loveliness to
take into the memory, as the poet enshrines in his soul
the impossible shape of his ideal, and consumes youth
and age searching in vain for its like. Fair Lady Geraldine!
thou wilt read these passionate words from
one whose worship of thy intoxicating loveliness has
never before found utterance, but if this truly told tale
should betray the hand that has dared to describe thy
beauty, in thy next orisons to St. Mary of Pity, breathe
from those bright lips a prayer that he may forget
thee!
By the side of the Lady Geraldine, but behind the
chair of the Grand Duchess, who listened to his conversation
with singular delight, stood a slight young
man of uncommon personal beauty, a stranger apparently
to every other person present. His brilliant uniform
alone betrayed him to be in the Russian diplomacy,
reigning Queen of the court, and the more powerful
and inaccessible queen of beauty, marked him as an
object of keen and universal curiosity. By the time
the fifth mazurka had concluded its pendulous refrain,
the Grand Chamberlain had tolerably well circulated
the name and rank of Count Basil Spirifort, the renowned
wit and elegant of Paris, newly appointed to
the Court of His Royal Highness of Tuscany. Fair
eyes wandered amid his sunny curls, and beating bosoms
hushed their pulses as he passed.
Count Basil knew the weight of a first impression.
Count Basil knew also the uses of contempt. Upon
the first principle he kept his place between the Grand
Duchess and Lady Geraldine, exerting his deeply studied
art of pleasing to draw upon himself their exclusive
attention. Upon the second principle, he was perfectly
unconscious of the presence of another human
being, and neither the gliding step of the small-eared
Princess S— in the waltz, nor the stately advance
of the last female of the Medici in the mazurka, distracted
his large blue eyes a moment from their idleness.
With one hand on the eagle-hilt of his sword,
and his side leant against the high cushion of red velvet
honored by the pressure of the Lady Geraldine, he
gazed up into that beaming face, when not bending
respectfully to the Duchess, and drank steadfastly from
her beauty, as the lotus cup drinks light from the sun.
The new Secretary had calculated well. In the
deep recess of the window looking toward San Miniato,
stood a lady nearly hidden from view by the muslin
curtains just stirring with the vibration of the music,
who gazed on the immediate circle of the Grand Duchess
with an interest that was not attempted to be disguised.
On her first entrance into the hall, the Marchesa
del Marmore had recognised in the new minion
of favor her impassioned lover of the lagoon, her slighted
of surprise was over, she looked on the form which
she had found beautiful even in the disguise of poverty,
and, forgetting her insulting repulse when he would
have claimed in public the smile she had given him
when unobserved, she recalled with delight every syllable
he had murmured in her ear, and every look she
had called forth in the light of a Venetian moon. The
man who had burned upon the altar of her vanity the
most intoxicating incense—who had broken through
the iron rules of convention and ceremony, to throw
his homage at her feet—who had portrayed so incomparably
(she believed) with his love-inspired pencil
the features imprinted on his heart---this chancewon
worshipper, this daring but gifted plebeian, as she
had thought him, had suddenly shot into her sphere
and become a legitimate object of love; and, beautified
by the splendor of dress, and distinguished by the
preference and favor of those incomparably above her,
he seemed tenfold, to her eyes, the perfection of adorable
beauty. As she remembered his eloquent devotion
to herself, and saw the interest taken in him by a woman
whom she hated and had calumniated—a woman who
she believed stood between her and all the light of existence—she
anticipated the triumph of taking him from
her side—of exhibiting him to the world as a falcon seduced
from his first quarry—and never doubting that
so brilliant a favorite would control the talisman of the
paradise she had so long wished to enter, she panted
for the moment when she should catch his eye and
draw him from his lure, and already heard the Chamberlain's
voice in her ear commanding her presence
after the ball in the saloon of Hercules.
The Marchesa had been well observed from the first
by the wily diplomate. A thorough adept in the art
(so necessary to his profession) of seeing without appearing
to see, he had scarce lost a shade of the varying
fancied him perfectly unconscious of her presence, he
read her tell-tale features as if they had given utterance
to her thoughts. He saw, with secret triumph,
the effect of his brilliant position upon her proud and
vain heart; watched her while she made use of her
throng of despised admirers to create a sensation near
him and attract his notice; and when the ball wore on,
and he was still in unwearied and exclusive attendance
upon the Lady Geraldine, he gazed after her with a
momentary curl of triumph on his lip, as she took up
her concealed position in the embayed window, and
abandoned herself to the bitter occupation of watching
the happiness of her rival. The Lady Geraldine had
never been so animated since her first appearance at
the Court of Tuscany.
It was past midnight when the Grand Duke, flushed
and tired with dancing, came to the side of the Lady
Geraldine. Count Basil gave place, and, remaining a
moment in nominal obedience to the Sovereign's polite
request which he was too politic to construe literally,
he looked down the dance with the air of one who has
turned his back on all that could interest him, and,
passing close to the concealed position of the Marchesa,
stepped out upon the balcony.
The air was cool, and the fountain played refreshingly
below. The Count Basil was one of those minds
which never have so much leisure for digression as
when they are most occupied. A love, as deep and
profound as the abysses of his soul, was weaving thread
for thread with a revenge worthy of a Mohican; yet,
after trying in vain to count eight in the Pleiades, he
raised himself upon the marble balustrade, and perfectly
anticipating the interruption to his solitude which
presently occurred, began to speculate aloud on the
dead and living at that hour beneath the roof of the
Pitti.
“A painter's mistress,” he said, “immortal in the
touch of her paramour's pencil, is worshipped for centuries
on these walls by the pilgrims of art; while the
warm perfection of all loveliness---the purest and divinest
of high-born women---will perish utterly with the
eyes that have seen her! The Bella of Titian, the
Fornarina of Raffaelle---peasant-girls of Italy---have,
at this moment, more value in this royal palace than
the breathing forms that inhabit it! The Lady Geraldine
herself, to whom the Sovereign offers at this moment
his most flattering homage, would be less a loss
to him than either! Yet they despise the gods of the
pencil who may thus make them immortal! The dull
blood in their noble veins, that never bred a thought
beyond the instincts of their kind, would look down,
forsooth, on the inventive and celestial ichor that inflames
the brain, and prompts the fiery hand of the
painter! How long will this very sovereign live in the
memories of men? The murderous Medici, the ambitious
cardinals, the abandoned women of an age gone
by, hang in imperishable colors on his walls; while of
him, the lord of this land of genius, there is not a bust
or a picture that would bring a sequin in the market-place!
They would buy genius in these days like
wine, and throw aside the flask in which it ripened.
Raffaelle and Buonarotti were companions for a pope
and his cardinals;---Titian was an honored guest for
the Doge. The stimulus to immortalize these noble
friends was in the love they bore them; and the secret
of their power to do it lay half in the knowledge of their
characters, gained by daily intimacy. Painters were
princes then, as they are beggars now; and the princely
art is beggared as well!”
The Marchesa del Marmore stepped out upon the
balcony, leaning on the arm of the Grand Chamberlain.
The soliloquizing Secretary had foretold to himself
both her coming and her companion.
“Monsieur le Comte,” said the Chamberlain, “La
Marchesa del Marmore wishes for the pleasure of your
acquaintance.”
Count Basil bowed low, and in that low and musical
tone of respectful devotion which, real or counterfeit,
made him irresistible to a woman who had a soul to be
thrilled, he repeated the usual nothings upon the beauty
of the night; and when the Chamberlain returned to
his duties, the Marchesa walked forth with her companion
to the cool and fragrant alleys of the garden,
and, under the silent and listening stars, implored forgiveness
for her pride; and, with the sudden abandonment
peculiar to the clime, poured into his ear the
passionate and weeping avowal of her sorrow and love.
“Those hours of penitence in the embayed window,”
thought Count Basil, “were healthy for your soul.”
And as she walked by his side, leaning heavily on his
arm, and half-dissolved in a confiding tenderness, his
thoughts reverted to another and a far sweeter voice;
and while the caressing words of the Marchesa fell on
an un-listening ear, his footsteps insensibly turned back
to the lighted hall.
6. VI.
As the daylight stole softly over Vallombrosa, the
luxurious chariot of the Marchesa del Marmore stopped
at the door of Count Basil. The Lady Geraldine's
suit had been successful; and the hitherto excluded
Florentine had received, from the hand of the man she
had once so ignorantly scorned, a privilege for which
she would have bartered her salvation;—she had supped
at his side in the saloon of Hercules. With many
faults of character, she was an Italian in feeling, and
had a capacity, like all her country-women, for a consuming
and headlong passion. She had better have
been born of marble.
“I have lifted you to heaven,” said Count Basil, as
her chariot wheels rolled from his door; “but it is as
the eagle soars into the clouds with the serpent. We
will see how you will relish the fall!”
2. PART II.
The Grand Duke's carriages, with their six horses and
outriders, had turned down the Borg'ognisanti, and the
“City of the Red Lily,” waking from her noon-day
slumber, was alive with the sound of wheels. The sun
was sinking over the Apennine which kneels at the
gate of Florence; the streets were cool and shadowy;
the old women, with the bambina between their knees,
braided straw at the doors; the booted guardsman
paced his black charger slowly over the jeweller's
bridge; the picture-dealer brought forward his brightest
“master” to the fading light; and while the famous
churches of that fairest city of the earth called to the
Ave-Maria with impatient bell, the gallantry and beauty
of Tuscany sped through the dampening air with their
swift horses, meeting and passing with gay greetings
amid the green alleys of the Cascine.
The twilight had become grey, when the carriages
and horsemen, scattered in hundreds through the interlaced
roads of this loveliest of parks, turned by common
consent toward the spacious square in the centre, and
drawing up in thickly serried ranks, the soiree on wheels,
the reunion en plein air, which is one of the most delightful
its healthful gaities. The showy carriages of the
Grand Duke and the ex-king of Wurtemberg (whose
rank would not permit them to share in the familiarities
of the hour) disappeared by the avenue skirting the
bank of the Arno, and with much delicate and some
desperate specimens of skill, the coachmen of the more
exclusive nobility threaded the embarrassed press of
vehicles, and laid their wheels together on the southern
edge of the piazza. The beaux in the saddle, disembarrassed
of ladies and axle-trees, enjoyed their usual
butter-fly privilege of roving, and with light rein and
ready spur pushed their impatient horses to the coronetted
panels of the loveliest or most powerful; the
laugh of the giddy was heard here and there over the
pawing of restless hoofs; an occasional scream, half of
apprehension, half of admiration, rewarded the daring
caracole of some young and bold rider; and while the
first star sprang to its place, and the dew of heaven
dropped into the false flowers in the hat of the belle,
and into the thirsting lips of the violet in the field, (simplicity,
like virtue, is its own reward!) the low murmur
of calumny and compliment, of love and light-heartedness,
of politeness, politics, puns, and poetry, arose
over that assembly upon wheels: and if it was not a
scene and an hour of happiness, it was the fault neither
of the fragrant eve nor of the provisions of nature
and fortune. The material for happiness was there.
A showy caleche with pannels of dusky crimson, the
hammer-cloth of the same shade, edged with a broad
fringe of white, the wheels slightly picked out with the
same colors, and the coachman and footman in corresponding
liveries, was drawn up near the southern edge
of the piazza. A narrow alley had been left for horsemen
between this equipage and the adjoining ones,
closed up at the extremity, however, by a dark-green and
very plain chariot, placed with a bold violation of etiquette
by two or three persons of the highest rank leaning
from their saddles in earnest conversation with the occupant.
Not far from the caleche, mounted upon an
English blood-horse of great beauty, a young man had
just drawn rein as if interrupted only for a moment on
some pressing errand, and with his hat slightly raised,
was paying his compliments to the venerable Prince
Poniatowski, at that time the Amphytrion of Florence.
From moment to moment, as the pauses occurred in
the exchange of courteous phrases, the rider, whose
spurred heel was close at his saddle-girths, stole an impatient
glance up the avenue of carriages to the dark-green
chariot, and, excited by the lifted rein and the
proximity of the spur, the graceful horse fretted on his
minion feet, and the bending figures from a hundred
vehicles, and the focus of bright eyes radiating from all
sides to the spot, would have betrayed, even to a
stranger, that the horseman was of no common mark.
Around his uncovered temples floated fair and well-cherished
locks of the sunniest auburn; and if there
was beauty in the finely-drawn lines of his lips, there
was an inexpressibly fierce spirit as well.
2. II.
The Count Basil had been a month at Florence. In
that time he had contrived to place himself between the
Duke's ear and all the avenues of favor, and had approached
as near, perhaps nearer, to the hearts of the
women of his court. A singular and instinctive knowledge
of the weaknesses of human nature, perfected and
concealed by conversance with the consummate refinement
of life at Paris, remarkable personal beauty, and
a quality of scornful bitterness for which no one could
divine a reason in a character and fate else so happily
mingled, but which at the same time added to his fascination,
had given Count Basil a command over the varied
difficult and capricious instrument. His worldly ambition
went swimmingly on, and the same wind filled
the sails of his lighter ventures as well. The love of
the Marchesa del Marmore, as he had very well anticipated,
grew with his influence and renown. A woman's
pride, he perfectly knew, is difficult to wake after
she has once believed herself adored; and, satisfied
that the portrait taken on the lagoon, and the introduction
he had given her to the exclusive penetralia of the
Pitti, would hold her till his revenge was complete, he
left her love for him to find its own food in his successes,
and never approached her, but to lay to her
heart more mordently the serpents of jealousy and
despair.
For the Lady Geraldine the Count Basil had conceived
a love, the deepest of which his nature was capable.
Long as he had known her, it was a passion
born in Italy, and while it partook of the qualities of
the clime, it had for its basis the habitual and well-founded
respect of a virtuous and sincere friendship.
At their first acquaintance at Paris, the lovely Englishwoman,
newly arrived from the purer moral atmosphere
of her own country, was moving in the dissolute,
but skilfully disguised society of the Faubourg St. Germain,
with the simple unconsciousness of the pure in
heart, innocent herself, and naturally unsuspicious of
others. The perfect frankness with which she established
an intimacy with the clever and accomplished
attache, had soon satisfied that clear-sighted person that
there was no passion in her preference, and, giddy with
the thousand pleasures of that metropolis of delight, he
had readily sunk his first startled admiration of her
beauty in an affectionate and confiding friendship. He
had thus shown her the better qualities of his character
only, and, charmed with his wit and penetration, and
something flattered, perhaps, with the devotion of so
had formed an attachment for him that had all the
earnestness of love without its passion. They met at
Florence, but the “knowledge of good and evil” had
by this time driven the Lady Geraldine from her Eden
of unconsciousness. Still as irreproachable in conduct,
and perhaps as pure in heart as before, an acquaintance
with the forms of vice had introduced into
her manners those ostensible cautions which, while they
protect, suggest also what is to be feared.
A change had taken place also in Count Basil. He
had left the vitreous and mercurial clime of France,
with its volatile and superficial occupations, for the voluptuous
and indolent air of Italy, and the study of its
impassioned deifications of beauty. That which had
before been in him an instinct of gay pleasure—a pursuit
which palled in the first moment of success, and
was second to his ambition or his vanity—had become,
in those two years of a painter's life, a thirst both of
the senses and the imagination, which had usurped the
very throne of his soul. Like the Hindoo youth, who
finds the gilded plaything of his childhood elevated in his
maturer years into a god, he bowed his heart to what he
held so lightly, and brought the costly sacrifice of time
and thought to its altars. He had fed his eyes upon
the divine glories of the pencil, and upon the breathing
wonders of love in marble, beneath the sky and in the
dissolving air in which they rose to the hand of inspiration;
and with his eye disciplined, and his blood fused
with taste and enthusiasm, that idolatry of beauty, which
had before seemed sensual or unreal, kindled its first
fires in his mind, and his senses were intoxicated with
the incense. There is a kind of compromise in the
effects of the atmosphere and arts of Italy. If the intellect
takes a warmer hue in its study of the fair models
of antiquity, the senses in turn become more refined
and intellectual. In other latitudes and lands
a passion of instinct, she is happy if she can retain her
empire by habit, or the qualities of the heart. That
divine form, meant to assimilate her to the angels, has
never been recognised by the dull eye that should have
seen in it a type of her soul. To the love of the painter
or the statuary, or to his who has made himself conversant
with their models, is added the imperishable
enthusiasm of a captivating and exalted study. The
mistress of his heart is the mistress of his mind. She
is the breathing realization of that secret ideal which
exists in every mind, but which, in men ignorant of the
fine arts, takes another form, and becomes a woman's
rival and usurper. She is like nothing in ambition—
she is like nothing in science or business—nothing in
out-of-door pleasures. If politics, or the chase, or the
acquisition of wealth, is the form of this ruling passion,
she is unassociated with that which is nearest his heart,
and he returns to her with an exhausted interest and a
flagging fancy. It is her strongest tie upon his affection,
even, that she is his refuge when unfit for that
which occupies him most—in his fatigue, his disappointment,
his vacuity of head and heart. He thinks
of her only as she receives him in his most worthless
hours; and, as his refreshed intellects awake, she is
forgotten with the first thought of his favorite theme—
for what has a woman's loveliness to do with that?
Count Basil had not concluded his first interview
with the Lady Geraldine, without marvelling at the new
feelings with which he looked upon her. He had
never before realized her singular and adorable beauty.
The exquisitely turned head, the small and pearly ears,
the spiritual nostril, the softly moulded chin, the clear
loftiness of expression yet inexpressible delicacy and
brightness in the lips, and a throat and bust than which
those of Faustina in the delicious marble of the Gallery
of Florence might be less envied by the Queen of
in the harmony of her motions, and the native and unapproachable
grace of every attitude; and the pictures
he had so passionately studied seemed to fade in his
mind, and the statutes he had half worshipped seemed
to descend from their pedestals depreciated. The
Lady Geraldine, for the first time, felt his eye. For
the first time in their acquaintance, she was offended
with its regard. Her embarrassment was read by the
quick diplomate, and at that moment sprang into being
a passion, which perhaps had died but for the conscious
acknowledgment of her rebuke.
Up to the evening in the Cascine, with which the second
chapter of this simply true tale commences, but
one of the two leading threads in the Count Basil's
woof had woven well. “The jealous are the damn'd,”
and the daily and deadly agony of the Marchesa del
Marmore was a dark ground from which his love to the
Lady Geraldine rose to his own eye in heightened relief.
His dearest joy forwarded with equal step his
dearest revenge; and while he could watch the working
of his slow torture in the fascinated heart of his
victim, he was content to suspend a blow to which that
of death would be a mercy. “The law,” said Count
Basil, as he watched her quivering and imploring lip,
“takes cognizance but of the murder of the body. It
has no retribution for the keener dagger of the soul.”
3. III.
The conversation between the Russian Secretary and
the Prince Poniatowski ended at last in a graceful bow
from the former to his horse's neck; and the quicker
rattling of the small hoofs on the ground, as the fine
creature felt the movement in the saddle and prepared
to bound away, drew all eyes once more upon the
handsomest and most idolized gallant of Florence. The
narrow lane of carriages, commencing with the showy
the plain chariot of the Lady Geraldine, was still open,
and with a glance at the latter which sufficiently indicated
his destination, Count Basil raised his spurred
heel, and with a smile of delight and the quickness of
a barb in the desert, galloped toward the opening. In
the same instant the Marchesa del Marmore gave a
convulsive spring forward, and, in obedience to an imperative
order, her coachman violently drew rein and
shot back the forward wheels of the caleche directly
across his path. Met in full career by this sudden obstacle,
the horse of the Russian reared high in air; but
ere the screams of apprehension had arisen from the
adjacent carriages, the silken bridle was slacked, and
with a low bow to the foiled and beautiful Marchesa as
he shot past, he brushed the hammer-cloths of the two
scarce separated carriages, and at the same instant
stood at the chariot window of the Lady Geraldine, as
calm and respectful as if he had never known danger
or emotion.
A hundred eyes had seen the expression of his face
as he leaped past the unhappy woman, and the drama
of which that look was the key was understood in Florence.
The Lady Geraldine alone, seated far back in
her chariot, was unconscious of the risk run for the
smile with which she greeted its hero; and unconscious,
as well, of the poignant jealousy and open mortification
she had innocently assisted to inflict, she
stretched her fair and transparent hand from the carriage,
and stroked the glossy neck of his horse, and
while the Marchesa del Marmore drove past with a
look of inexpressible anguish and hate, and the dispersing
nobles and dames took their way to the city gates,
Count Basil leaned close to the ear of that loveliest of
breathing creatures, and forgot, as she forgot in listening
to the bewildering music of his voice, that the
them.
The Cascine had long been silent when the chariot
of the Lady Geraldine took its way to the town, and,
with the reins loose upon his horse's neck, Count
Basil followed at a slower pace, lost in the reverie of a
tumultuous passion. The sparkling and unobstructed
stars broke through the leafy roof of the avenue whose
silence was disturbed by those fine and light-stepping
hoofs, and the challenge of the Duke's forester, going
his rounds ere the gates closed, had its own deep-throated
echo for its answer. The Arno rippled among
the rushes on its banks, the occasional roll of wheels
passing the paved arch of the Ponte Seraglio, came
faintly down the river upon the moist wind, the pointed
cypresses of the Convent of Bello Sguardo laid their
slender fingers against the lowest stars in the southern
horizon, and with his feet pressed, carelessly, far
through his stirrups, and his head dropped on his bosom,
the softened diplomate turned instinctively to the
left in the last diverging point of the green alleys, and
his horse's ears were already pricked at the tread, before
the gate, of the watchful and idle doganieri.
Close under the city wall, on this side Florence, the
traveler will remember that the trees are more thickly
serried, and the stone seats, for the comfort and pleasure
of those who would step forth from the hot streets
for an hour of fresh air and rest, are mossy with the
depth of the perpetual shade. In the midst of this dark
avenue, the unguided animal beneath the careless and
forgetful rider suddenly stood still, and the next moment
starting aside, a female sprang high against his
neck, and Count Basil, ere awake from his reverie, felt
the glance of a dagger-blade across his bosom.
With the slender wrist that had given the blow firmly
arrested in his left hand, the Count Basil slowly dismounted,
and after a steadfast look, by the dim light,
fingers respectfully, and with well counterfeited emotion,
to his lips.
“Twice since the Ave-Maria!” he said in a tone of
reproachful tenderness, “and against a life that is your
own!”
He could see, even in that faint light, the stern compression
of those haughty lips, and the flash of the
darkest eyes of the Val d'Arno. But leading her gently
to a seat, he sat beside her, and with scarce ten brief
moments of low-toned and consummate eloquence, he
once more deluded her soul!
“We meet to-morrow,” she said, as after a burst of
irrepressible tears, she disengaged herself from his
neck, and looked toward the end of the avenue, where
Count Basil had already heard the pawing of her impatient
horses.
“To-morrow!” he answered; “but, mia carissima!”
he continued, opening his breast to stanch the blood of
his wound, “you owe me a concession after this rude
evidence of your love.”
She looked into his face as if answer were superfluous.
“Drive to my palazzo at noon, and remain with me
till the Ave-Maria.”
For but half a moment the impassioned Italian hesitated.
Though the step he demanded of her was apparently
without motive or reason—though it was one
that sacrificed to a whim her station, her fortune, and
her friends—she hesitated but to question her reason
if the wretched price of this sacrifice would be paid—
if the love, to which she fled from this world and heaven,
was her own. In other countries, the crime of infidelity
is punished—in Italy it is the appearance only
that is criminal. In proportion as the sin is overlooked,
the violation of the outward proprieties of life is severely
visited; and while a lover is stipulated for in the
is an offence which brands the perpetrator with irremediable
shame. The Marchesa del Marmore well
knew that in going forth from the ancestral palace of
her husband on a visit to Count Basil, she took leave
of it for ever. The equipage that would bear her to
him would never return for her; the protection, the
fortune, the noble relations, the troops of friends,
would all drop from her. In the pride of her youth
and beauty,—from the highest pinnacle of rank,—
from the shelter of fortune and esteem—she would descend,
by a single step, to be a beggar for life and love
from the mercy of the heart she fled to!
“I will come,” she said, in a firm voice, looking
close into his face, as if she would read in his dim features
the prophetic answer of his soul.
The Count Basil strained her to his bosom, and
starting back as if with the pain of his wound, he
pleaded the necessity of a surgeon, and bade her a
hasty good-night. And while she gained her own carriage
in secrecy, he rode round to the other gate,
which opens upon the Borg'-ognisanti, and dismounting
at the Cafe Colonna, where the artists were at this
hour usually assembled, he sought out his fellow-traveler,
Giannino Speranza, who had sketched the Marchesa
upon the lagoon, and made an appointment with
him for the morrow.
4. IV.
While the Count Basil's revenge sped thus merrily,
the just Fates were preparing for him a retribution in
his love. The mortification of the Marchesa del Marmore,
at the Cascine, had been made the subject of
conversation at the prima sera of the Lady Geraldine;
and other details of the same secret drama transpiring
at the same time, the whole secret of Count Basil's
feelings toward that unfortunate woman flashed clearly
have drawn the portrait of the lagoon, for procuring
her an admission to the exclusive suppers of the Pitti,
for a thousand things which had been unaccountable,
or referred to more amiable causes, were at once unveiled.
Even yet, with no suspicion of the extent of
his revenge, the Lady Geraldine felt an indignant pity
for the unconscious victim, and a surprised disapproval
of the character thus unmasked to her eye. Upon
further reflection, her brow flushed to remember that
she herself had been made the most effective tool of
his revenge; and as she recalled circumstance after
circumstance in the last month's history, the attention
and preference he had shown her, and which had gratified
her, perhaps, more than she admitted to herself,
seemed to her sensitive and resentful mind to have
been only the cold instruments of jealousy. Incapable
as she was of an unlawful passion, the unequalled fascinations
of Count Basil had silently found their way
to her heart, and if her indignation was kindled by a
sense of justice and womanly pity, it was fed and fanned
unaware by mortified pride. She rang, and sent
an order to the gate that she was to be denied for the
future to Count Basil Spirifort.
The servant had appeared with his silver tray in his
hand, and before leaving her presence to communicate
the order, he presented her with a letter. Well foreseeing
the eclaircissement which must follow the public
scene in the Cascine, the Count Basil had left the cafe
for his own palazzo, and, in a letter, of which the following
is the passage most important to our story, he
revealed to the lady he loved a secret, which he hoped
would anticipate the common rumor:—
“But these passionate words will have offended
your ear, dearest lady, and I must pass to a
theme on which I shall be less eloquent. You will
hear to-night, perhaps, that which, with all your imagination,
hear to-morrow. The Marchesa del Marmore is the
victim of a revenge which has only been second in my
heart to the love I have for the first time breathed to
you. I can never hope that you will either understand
or forgive the bitterness in which it springs; yet it is a
demon to which I am delivered, soul and body, and no
spirit but my own can know its power. When I have
called it by its name, and told you of its exasperation,
if you do not pardon, you will pity me.
“You know that I am a Russian, and you know the
station my talents have won me; but you do not know
that I was born a serf and a slave! If you could rend
open my heart and see the pool of blackness and bitterness
that lies in its bottom, fallen, drop by drop,
from this accursed remembrance, there would be little
need to explain to you how this woman has offended
me. Had I been honorably born, like yourself, I feel
that I could have been, like you, an angel of light: as
it is, the contumely of a look has stirred me to a revenge
which has in it, I do not need to be told, the
darkest elements of murder.
“My early history is of no importance, yet I may
tell you it was such as to expose to every wind this lacerated
nerve. In a foreign land, and holding an official
rank, it was seldom breathed upon. I wore, mostly,
a gay heart at Paris. In my late exile at Venice I
had time to brood upon my dark remembrance, and it
was revived and fed by the melancholy of my solitude.
The obscurity in which I lived, and the occasional comparison
between myself and some passing noble in the
Piazza, served to remind me, could I have forgotten it.
I never dreamed of love in this humble disguise, and
so never felt the contempt that had most power to
wound me. On receiving the letters of my new appointment,
however, this cautious humility did not wait
to be put off with my sombrero. I started for Florence,
gay mood of a courtier beneath. The first burst of
my newly-released feelings was admiration for a woman
of singular beauty, who stood near me on one of
the most love-awakening and delicious eves that I ever
remember. My heart was overflowing, and she permitted
me to breathe my passionate adoration in her
ear. The Marchesa del Marmore, but for the scorn of
the succeeding day, would, I think, have been the mistress
of my soul. Strangely enough, I had seen you
without loving you.
“I have told you, as a bagatelle that might amuse
you, my rencontre with del Marmore and his dame in
the cathedral of Bologna. The look she gave me there
sealed her doom. It was witnessed by the companions
of my poverty, and the concentrated resentment
of years sprang up at the insult. Had it been a man,
I must have struck him dead where he stood;---she
was a woman, and I swore the downfall of her
pride.”
Thus briefly dismissing the chief topic of his letter,
Count Basil returned to the pleading of his love. It
was dwelt on more eloquently than his revenge; but
as the Lady Geraldine scarce read it to the end, it need
not retard the procession of events in our story. The
fair Englishwoman sat down beneath the Etruscan
lamp, whose soft light illumined a brow, cleared, as if
by a sweep from the wing of her good angel, of the
troubled dream which had overhung it, and in brief
and decided, but kind and warning words, replied to
the letter of Count Basil.
5. V.
It was noon on the following day, and the Contadini
from the hills were settling to their siesta on the steps
of the churches, and against the columns of the Piazza
del Gran' Duca. The artists alone, in the cool gallery,
the drowsiness of the hour, and strained sight and
thought upon the immortal canvas from which they
drew; while the sculptor, in his brightening studio,
weary of the mallet, yet excited by the bolder light,
leaned on the rough block behind him, and with listless
body but wakeful and fervent eye, studied the last
touches upon his marble.
Prancing hoofs, and the sharp quick roll peculiar to
the wheels of carriages of pleasure, awakened the aristocratic
sleepers of the Via dei Servi, and with a lash
and jerk of violence, the coachman of the Marchesa
del Marmore, enraged at the loss of his noon-day repose,
brought up her showy caleche at the door of
Count Basil Spirifort. The fair occupant of that luxurious
vehicle was pale, but the brightness of joy and
hope burned almost fiercely in her eye.
The doors flew open as the Marchesa descended,
and following a servant in the Count's livery, of whom
she asked no question, she found herself in a small saloon,
furnished with the peculiar luxury which marks
the apartment of a bachelor, and darkened like a painter's
room. The light came in from a single tall window,
curtained below, and under it stood an easel, at
which, on her first entrance, a young man stood sketching
the outline of a female head. As she advanced,
looking eagerly around for another face, the artist laid
down his palette, and with a low reverence presented
her with a note from Count Basil. It informed her
that political news of the highest importance had called
him suddenly to the cabinet of his Chef, but that he
hoped to be with her soon; and, meantime, he begged
of her, as a first favor in his newly-prospered love, to
bless him with the possession of her portrait, done by
the incomparable artist who would receive her.
Disappointment and vexation overwhelmed the heart
of the Marchesa, and she burst into tears. She read
with epithets of endearment, and seemed to her written
in the most sudden haste. Never doubting for an
instant the truth of his apology, she removed her hat,
and with a look at the deeply-shaded mirror, while she
shook out from their confinement the masses of her
luxuriant hair, she approached the painter's easel, and
with a forced cheerfulness inquired in what attitude she
should sit to him.
“If the Signora will amuse herself,” he replied, with
a bow, “it will be easy to compose the picture, and
seize the expression without annoying her with a posse.”
Relieved thus of any imperative occupation, the unhappy
Marchesa seated herself by a table of intaglios
and prints, and while she apparently occupied herself
in the examination of these specimens of art, she was
delivered, as her tormentor had well anticipated, to
the alternate tortures of impatience and remorse. And
while the hours wore on, and her face paled, and her
eyes grew bloodshot with doubt and fear, the skilful
painter, forgetting every thing in the enthusiasm of his
art, and forgotten utterly by his unconscious subject,
transferred too faithfully to the canvas that picture of
agonized expectation.
The afternoon meantime had worn away, and the
gay world of Florence, from the side towards Fiesole,
rolled past the Via dei Servi on their circuitous way to
the Cascine, and saw, with dumb astonishment, the
carriage and liveries of the Marchesa del Marmore at
the door of Count Basil Spirifort. On they swept by
the Via Mercata Nova to the Lung' Arno, and there
their astonishment redoubled; for in the window of
the Casino dei Nobili, playing with a billiard-cue, and
laughing with a group of lounging exquisites, stood
Count Basil himself, the most unoccupied and listless
of sunset idlers. There was but one deduction to be
drawn from this sequence of events; and when they
on the previous evening in the Cascine, Count Basil,
evidently innocent of participation in her passion, was
deemed a persecuted man, and the Marchesa del Marmore
was lost to herself and the world!
Three days after this well-remembered circumstance
in the history of Florence, an order was received from
the Grand Duke to admit into the exhibition of modern
artists a picture by a young Venetian painter, an
eleve of Count Basil Spirifort. It was called “The
Lady expecting an Inconstant,” and had been pronounced
by a virtuoso who had seen it on private view,
to be a master-piece of expression and color. It was
instantly and indignantly recognised as the portrait of
the unfortunate Marchesa, whose late abandonment of
her husband was fresh on the lips of common rumor;
but ere it could be officially removed, the circumstance
had been noised abroad, and the picture had been seen
by all the curious in Florence. The order for its removal
was given; but the purpose of Count Basil had
been effected, and the name of the unhappy Marchesa
had become a jest on the vulgar tongue.
This tale had not been told, had there not been more
than a common justice in its sequel. The worst passions
of men, in common life, are sometimes inscrutably
prospered. The revenge of Count Basil, however,
was betrayed by the last which completed it; and
while the victim of his fiendish resentment finds a peaceful
asylum in England under the roof of the compassionate
Lady Geraldine, the once gay and admired Russian
wanders from city to city, followed by an evil reputation,
and stamped unaccountably as a Jattatore.[1]
LOVE AND DIPLOMACY.
For I am like a boy that hath found money—
Afraid I dream still.”
Ford or Webster.
It was on a fine September evening, within my time,
(and I am not, I trust, too old to be loved,) that Count
Anatole L—, of the impertinent and particularly useless
profession of attache, walked up and down before the
glass in his rooms at the “Archduke Charles,” the first
hotel, as you know, if you have traveled, in the green-belted
and fair city of Vienna. The brass ring was
still swinging on the end of the bell-rope, and, in a respectful
attitude at the door, stood the just-summoned
Signor Attilio, valet and privy councillor to one of the
handsomest coxcombs errant through the world. Signor
Attilio was a Tyrolese, and, like his master was
very handsome.
Count Anatole had been idling away three golden
summer months in the Tyrol, for the sole purpose, as
far as mortal eyes could see, of disguising his fine
Phidian features in a callow moustache and whiskers.
The crines ridentes (as Eneas Sylvius has it) being now
in a condition beyond improvement, Signor Attilio had
for some days been rather curious to know what course
his master.
After a turn or two more, taken in silence, Count
Anatole stopped in the middle of the floor, and eyeing
the well-made Tyrolese from head to foot, begged to
know if he wore at the present moment his most becoming
breeches, jacket, and beaver.
Attilio was never astonished at any thing his master
did or said. He simply answered, “Si Signore.”
“Be so kind as to strip immediately, and dress yourself
in that traveling suit lying on the sofa.”
As the green, gold-corded jacket, knee-breeches,
buckles, and stockings, were laid aside, Count Anatole
threw off his dressing-gown, and commenced encasing
his handsome proportions in the cast-off habiliments.
He then put on the conical, slouch-rimmed hat, with
the tall eagle's feather stuck jauntily on the side and the
two rich tassels pendent over his left eye, and, the toilet
of the valet being completed at the same moment, they
stood looking at one another with perfect gravity—
rather transformed, but each apparently quite at home
in his new character.
“You look very like a gentleman, Attilio,” said the
Count.
“Your Excellency has caught to admiration, l'aria
del paese,” complimented back again the sometime
Tyrolese.
“Attilio!”
“Signore?”
“Do you remember the lady in the forest of Friuli?”
Attilio began to have a glimmering of things. Some
three months before, the Count was dashing on at a
rapid post-pace, through a deep wood in the mountains
which head in the Adriatic. A sudden pull-up at a
turning in the road nearly threw him from his britska,
and looking out at the “anima di porco!” of the postillion,
he found his way impeded by an overset carriage, from
the body of an old man, killed by the accident.
There was more attractive metal for the traveler,
however, in the shape of a young and beautiful woman,
leaning, pale and faint, against a tree, and apparently
about to sink to the ground, unassisted. To bring a
hat full of water from the nearest brook, and receive
her falling head on his shoulder, was the work of a
thought. She had fainted quite away, and taking her,
like a child, into his arms, he placed her on a bank by
the road-side, bathed her forehead and lips, and chafed
her small white hands, till his heart, with all the distress
of the scene, was quite mad with her perfect
beauty.
Animation at last began to return, and as the flush
was stealing into her lips, another carriage drove up
with servants in the same livery, and Count Anatole,
thoroughly bewildered in his new dream, mechanically
assisted them in getting their living mistress and dead
master into it, and until they were fairly out of sight, it
had never occurred to him that he might possibly wish
to know the name and condition of the fairest piece of
work he had ever seen from the hands of his Maker.
An hour before, he had doubled his bono mano to the
postilion, and was driving on to Vienna as if to sit at a
new Congress. Now, he stood leaning against the
tree, at the foot of which the grass and wild flowers
showed the print of a new-made pressure, and the
postilion cracked his whip, and Attilio reminded him
of the hour he was losing, in vain.
He remounted after a while; but the order was to
go back to the last post-house.
Three or four months at a solitary albergo in the
neighborhood of this adventure, passed by the Count in
scouring the country on horseback in every direction,
and by his servant in very particular ennui, brings up
the story nearly to where the scene opens.
“I have seen her!” said the Count.
Attilio only lifted up his eyebrows.
“She is here, in Vienna!”
“Felice lei!” murmured Attilio.
“She is the Princess Leichstenfels, and, by the death
of that old man, a widow.”
“Veramente?” responded the valet, with a rising inflexion;
for he knew his master and French morals
too well not to foresee a damper in the possibility of
matrimony.
“Veramente!” gravely echoed the Count. “And
now, listen, The Princess lives in close retirement.
An old friend or two, and a tried servant, are the only
persons who see her. You are to contrive to see this
servant to-morrow, corrupt him to leave her, and recommend
me in his place, and then you are to take
him as your courier to Paris; whence, if I calculate
well, you will return to me before long, with important
despatches. Do you understand me?”
“Signor, si!”
In the small boudoir of a maison de plaisance, belonging
to the noble family of Leichstenfels, sat the widowed
mistress of one of the oldest titles and finest estates
of Austria. The light from a single long window
opening down to the floor and leading out upon a terrace
of flowers, was subdued by a heavy crimson curtain,
looped partially away, a pastille lamp was sending
up from its porphyry pedestal a thin and just perceptible
curl of smoke, through which the lady musingly
passed backwards and forwards one of her slender fingers,
and, on a table near, lay a sheet of black-edged
paper, crossed by a small silver pen, and scrawled over
irregularly with devices and disconnected words, the
work evidently of a fit of the most absolute and listless
idleness.
The door opened, and a servant in mourning livery
stood before the lady.
“I have thought over your request, Wilhelm,” she
said. “I had become accustomed to your services,
and regret to lose you; but I should regret more to
stand in the way of your interest. You have my permission.”
Wilhelm expressed his thanks with an effort that
showed he had not obeyed the call of Mammon without
regret, and requested leave to introduce the person
he had proposed as his successor.
“Of what country is he?”
“Tyrolese, your Excellency.”
“And why does he leave the gentleman with whom
he came to Vienna?”
“Il est amoureux d'une Viennaise, madame,” answered
the ex-valet, resorting to French to express what he
considered a delicate circumstance.
“Pauvre enfant!” said the Princess, with a sigh that
partook as much of envy as of pity; let him come in!”
And the Count Anatole, as the sweet accents reached
his ear, stepped over the threshold, and in the coarse
but gay dress of the Tyrol, stood in the presence of her
whose dewy temples he had bathed in the forest, whose
lips he had almost “pried into for breath,” whose
snowy hands he had chafed and kissed when the senses
had deserted their celestial organs—the angel of his
perpetual dream, the lady of his wild and uncontrollable,
but respectful and honorable love.
The Princess looked carelessly up as he approached,
but her eyes seemed arrested in passing over his features.
It was but momentary. She resumed her occupation
of winding her taper fingers in the smoke
curls of the incense-lamp, and with half a sigh, as if
she had repelled a pleasing thought, she leaned back
in the silken fauteuil, and asked the new comer his
name.
“Anatole, your Excellency.”
The voice again seemed to stir something in her
was for a moment lost in thought.
“Anatole,” she said (Oh, how the sound of his own
name, murmured in that voice of music, thrilled through
the fiery veins of the disguised lover!) “Anatole, I
receive you into my service. Wilhelm will inform you
of your duties, and—I have a fancy for the dress of the
Tyrol—you may wear it instead of my livery, if you
will.”
And with one stolen and warm gaze from under his
drooping eyelids, and heart and lips on fire, as he
thanked her for her condescension, the new retainer
took his leave.
Month after month passed on—to Count Anatole in
a bewildering dream of ever deepening passion. It was
upon a soft and amorous morning of April, that a dashing
equipage stood at the door of the proud palace of
Leichstenfels. The arms of E— blazed on the
panels, and the insouciants chasseurs leaned against the
marble columns of the portico, waiting for their master,
and speculating on the gaiety likely to ensue from the
suit he was prosecuting within. How could a Prince
of E— be supposed to sue in vain?
The disguised footman had ushered the gay and
handsome nobleman to his mistress's presence. After
re-arranging a family of very well-arranged flowerpots,
shutting the window to open it again, changing
the folds of the curtains not at all for the better, and
looking a stolen and fierce look at the unconscious
visiter, he could find no longer an apology for remaining
in the room. He shut the door after him in a tempest
of jealousy.
“Did your Excellency ring?” said he, opening
the door again, after a few minutes of intolerable torture;
The Prince was on his knees at her feet!
“No, Anatole; but you may bring me a glass of
water.”
As he entered with the silver tray trembling in his
hand, the Prince was rising to go. His face expressed
delight, hope, triumph—every thing that could madden
the soul of the irritated lover. After waiting on his
rival to his carriage, he returned to his mistress, and
receiving the glass upon the tray, was about leaving
the room in silence, when the Princess called to him.
In all this lapse of time it is not to be supposed that
Count Anatole played merely his footman's part. His
respectful and elegant demeanor, the propriety of his
language, and that deep devotedness of manner which
wins a woman more than all things else, soon gained
upon the confidence of the Princess; and before a
week was past she found that she was happier when he
stood behind her chair, and gave him, with some self-denial,
those frequent permissions of absence from the
palace which she supposed he asked to prosecute the
amour disclosed to her on his introduction to her service.
As time flew on, she attributed his earnestness
and occasional warmth of manner to gratitude; and,
without reasoning much on her feelings, gave herself
up to the indulgence of a degree of interest in him
which would have alarmed a woman more skilled in the
knowledge of the heart. Married from a convent,
however, to an old man who had secluded her from
the world, the voice of the passionate Count in the
forest of Friuli was the first sound of love that had ever
entered her ears. She knew not why it was that the
tones of her new footman, and now and then a look of
his eyes, as he leaned over to assist her at table troubled
her memory like a trace of a long lost dream.
But, oh, what moments had been his in these fleeting
months! Admitted to her presence in her most
unguarded hours—seeing her at morning, at noon, at
for ever near her, and with the world shut out,—her
rich hair blowing with the lightest breeze across his
fingers in his assiduous service—her dark full eyes, unconscious
of an observer, filling with unrepressed tears,
or glowing with pleasure over some tale of love—her
exquisite form flung upon a couch, or bending over
flowers, or moving about the room in all its native and
untrammelled grace—and her voice, tender, most tender
to him, though she knew it not, and her eyes, herself
unaware, ever following him in his loitering attendance---and
he, the while, losing never a glance nor a
motion, but treasuring all up in his heart with the avarice
of a miser---what, in common life, though it were
the life of fortune's most favored child, could compare
with it for bliss?
Pale and agitated, the Count turned back at the call
of his mistress, and stood waiting her pleasure.
“Anatole!”
“Madame!”
The answer was so low and deep it startled even
himself.
She motioned him to come nearer. She had sunk
upon the sofa, and as he stood at her feet she leaned
forward, buried her hands and arms in the long curls
which, in her retirement, she allowed to float luxuriantly
over her shoulders, and sobbed aloud. Overcome
and forgetful of all but the distress of the lovely
creature before him, the Count dropped upon the cushion
on which rested the small foot in its mourning slipper,
and taking her hand, pressed it suddenly and fervently
to his lips.
The reality broke upon her! She was beloved---
but by whom? A menial! and the appalling answer
drove all the blood of her proud race in a torrent upon
her heart, sweeping away all affection as if her nature
and laid her hand upon the bell.
“Madame!” said Anatole, in a cold proud tone.
She stayed her arm to listen.
“I leave you forever.”
And again, with the quick revulsion of youth and
passion, her woman's heart rose within her, and she
buried her face in her hands, and dropped her head in
utter abandonment on her bosom.
It was the birth-day of the Emperor, and the courtly
nobles of Austria were rolling out from the capital to offer
their congratulations at the royal palace of Schoenbrunn.
In addition to the usual attractions of the
scene, the drawing-room was to be graced by the first
public appearance of a new ambassador, whose reputed
personal beauty, and the talents he had displayed in a
late secret negociation, had set the whole court, from
the Queen of Hungary to the youngest dame d'honneur,
in a flame of curiosity.
To the Prince E------ there was another reason for
writing the day in red letters. The Princess Leichstenfels,
by an express message from the Empress, was
to throw aside her widow's weeds, and appear once
more to the admiring world. She had yielded to the
summons, but it was to be her last day of splendor.
Her heart and hand were plighted to her Tyrolese
menial, and the brightest and loveliest ornament of the
Court of Austria, when the ceremonies of the day were
over, was to lay aside the costly bauble from her shoulder,
and the glistening tiara from her brow, and forget
rank and fortune as the wife of his bosom!
The dazzling hours flew on. The plain and kind
old Emperor welcomed and smiled upon all. The
wily Metternich, in the crime of his successful manhood,
cool, polite, handsome, and winning, gathered
golden opinions by every word and look; the young
struck eagle of St. Helena, surrounded and caressed
by a continual cordon of admiring women, seemed forgetful
that Opportunity and Expectation awaited him,
like two angels with their wings outspread; and haughty
nobles and their haughtier dames, statesmen, scholars,
soldiers, and priests, crowded upon each other's heels,
and mixed together in that doubtful podrida, which
goes by the name of pleasure. I could moralise here
had I time!
The Princess of Leichstenfels had gone through the
ceremony of presentation, and had heard the murmur
of admiration, drawn by her beauty from all lips. Dizzy
with the scene, and with a bosom full of painful and
conflicting emotions, she had accepted the proffered
arm of Prince E— to breathe a fresher air upon the
terrace. They stood near a window, and he was pointing
out to his fair but inattentive companion the various
characters as they passed within.
“I must contrive,” said the Prince, “to show you
the new Envoy. Oh! you have not heard of him.
Beautiful as Narcissus, modest as Pastor Corydon, clever
as the prime minister himself, this paragon of diplomatists
has been here in disguise these three months,
negociating about—Metternich and the devil knows
what—but rewarded at last with an ambassador's star,
and---but here he is; Princess Leichstenfels, permit
me to present ------”
She heard no more. A glance from the diamond
star on his breast, to the Hephæstion mouth and keen
dark eye of Count Anatole, revealed to her the mystery
of months. And as she leaned against the window
for support, the hand that sustained her in the Forest of
Friuli, and the same thrilling voice, in almost the same
never-forgotten cadence, offered his impassioned sympathy
and aid, and she recognised and remembered all.
I must go back so far as to inform you, that Count
Anatole, on the morning of this memorable day, had
sacrificed a silky, but prurient moustache, and a pair
of the very sauciest dark whiskers out of Coventry.
Whether the Prince E------ recognised in the new Envoy,
the lady's gentleman who so inopportunely broke
in upon his tender avowal, I am not prepared to say. I
only know (for I was there) that the Princess Leichstenfels
was wedded to the new ambassador in the
“leafy month of June,” and the Prince E------, unfortunately
prevented by illness from attending the nuptials,
lost a very handsome opportunity of singing with
effect,
Whether the enamored ambassadress prefers her
husband in his new character, I am equally uncertain;
though, from much knowledge of German Courts and
a little of human nature, I think she will be happy if at
some future day she would not willingly exchange her
proud Envoy for the devoted Tyrolese, and does not
sigh that she can no more bring him to her feet with a
pull of a silken string.
THE
MADHOUSE OF PALERMO.
He who has not skimmed over the silvery waters of
the Lipari, with a summer breeze right from Italy in
his topsails, the smoke of Stromboli alone staining the
unfathomable looking blue of the sky, and, as the sun
dipped his flaming disk in the sea, put up his helm for
the bosom of La Concha d'Oro, the Golden Shell, as
they beautifully call the Bay of Palermo; he who has
not thus entered, I say, to the fairest spot on the face
of this very fair earth, has a leaf worth the turning in
his book of observation.
In ten minutes after dropping the anchor, with sky
and water still in a glow, the men were all out of the
rigging, the spars of the tall frigate were like lines pencilled
on the sky, the band played inspiringly on the
poop, and every boat along the gay Marina was
freighted with fair Palermitans on its way to the stranger
ship.
I was standing with the officer of the deck by the
capstan, looking at the first star which had just sprung
into its place like a thing created with a glance of the
eye.
“Shall we let the ladies aboard, sir?” said a smiling
middy, coming aft from the gangway.
“Yes, sir. And tell the boatswain's mate to clear
away for a dance on the quarter-deck.”
In most of the ports of the Mediterranean a ship of
war, on a summer cruise, is as welcome as the breeze
from the sea. Bringing with her forty or fifty gay
young officers overcharged with life and spirits, a band
of music never so well occupied as when playing for a
dance, and a deck whiter and smoother than a ball-room
floor, the warlike vessel seems made for a scene
of pleasure. Whatever her nation, she no sooner drops
her anchor, than she is surrounded by boats from the
shore; and when the word is passed for admission, her
gangway is crowded with the mirth-loving and warm
people of these southern climes, as much at home on
board, and as ready to enter into any scheme of amusement,
as the maddest-brained midshipman could
desire.
The companion-hatch was covered with its grating,
lest some dizzy waltzer should drop his partner into the
steerage, the band got out their music stand, and the
bright buttons were soon whirling round from larboard
to starboard, with forms in their clasp, and dark eyes
glowing over their shoulders, that might have tempted
the devil out of Stromboli.
Being only a passenger myself, I was contented with
sitting on the slide of a carronade, and with the music
in my ear, and the twilight flush deepening in the fine-traced
angles of the rigging, abandoning myself to the
delicious listlessness with which the very air is pregnant
in these climates of paradise.
The light feet slid by, and the waltz, the gallopade,
and the mazurka, had followed each other till it was
broad moonlight on the decks. It was like a night
without an atmosphere—the radiant flood poured down
with such an invisible and moon-like clearness.
“Do you see the lady leaning on that old gentleman's
arm by the hammock-rail?” said the first lieutenant,
who sat upon the next gun, like myself, a spectator
of the scene.
I had remarked her well. She had been in the ship
five or ten minutes, and in that time, it seemed to me,
I had drunk her beauty, even to intoxication The
frigate was slowly swinging round to the land breeze,
and the moon, from drawing the curved line of a gipsey-shaped
capella di paglia with bewitching concealment
across her features, gradually fell full upon the
dark limit of her orbed forehead. Heaven! what a
vision of beauty! Solemn, and full of subdued pain
as the countenance seemed, it was radiant with an almost
supernatural light of mind. Thought and feeling
seemed steeped into every line. Her mouth was large
—the only departure from the severest model of the
Greek—and stamped with calmness, as if it had been a
legible word upon her lips. But her eyes—what can
I say of their unnatural lightning—of the depth, the
fulness, the wild and maniac-like passionateness of their
every look?
My curiosity was strongly moved. I walked aft to
the capstan, and throwing off my habitual reserve with
some effort, approached the old gentleman on whose
arm she leaned, and begged permission to lead her out
for a waltz.
“If you wish it, carissima mia!” said he, turning to
her with all the tenderness in his tone of which the
honied language of Italy is capable.
But she clung to his arm with startled closeness, and
without even looking at me, turned her lips up to his
ear, and murmured, “Mai piu!”
At my request the officer on duty paid them the compliment
of sending them ashore in one of the frigate's
boats, and after assisting them down the ladder, I stood
upon the broad stair on the level of the water, and
the bright sparkles were lost amid the vessels nearer
land. The coxswain reported the boat's return; but
all that belonged to the ship had not come back in her.
My heart was left behind.
The next morning there was the usual bustle in the
gun-room preparatory to going ashore. Glittering uniforms
lay about upon the chairs and tables, sprinkled
with swords, epaulettes, and cocked hats; very well
brushed boots were sent to be re-brushed, and very
nice coats to be made, if possible, to look nicer; the
ship's barber was cursed for not having the hands of
Briareus, and no good was wished to the eyes of the
washerwoman of the last port where the frigate had
anchored. Cologne water was in great request, and
the purser had an uncommon number of “private interviews.”
Amid all the bustle, the question of how to pass the
day was busily agitated. Twenty plans were proposed;
but the sequel—a dinner at the Hotel Anglais, and a
“stroll for a lark” after it—was the only point on
which the speakers were quite unanimous.
One proposition was to go to Bagaria, and see the
Palace of Monsters. This is a villa about ten miles
from Palermo, which the owner, Count Pallagonia, an
eccentric Sicilian noble, has ornamented with some
hundreds of statues of the finest workmanship, representing
the form of woman in every possible combination,
with beasts, fishes, and birds. It looks like the
temptation of St. Anthony on a splendid scale, and is
certainly one of the most extraordinary spectacles in
the world.
Near it stands another villa, the property of Prince
Butera, (the present minister of Naples at the court of
France,) containing, in the depths of its pleasure
grounds, a large monastery, with wax monks, of the
size and appearance of life, scattered about the passages,
avocation. It is a whimsical satire on the Order,
done to the life.
Another plan was to go to the Capuchin Convent,
and see the dried friars—six or eight hundred bearded
old men, baked, as they died, in their cowls and beards,
and standing against the walls in ghastly rows, in the
spacious vaults of the monastery. A more infernal spectacle
never was seen by mortal eyes.
A drive to Monreale, a nest of a village on the
mountain above the town, a visit to the gardens of a
nobleman who salutes the stranger with a jet d'eau at
every turning, and a lounge in the public promenade
of Palermo itself, shared the honors of the argument.
I had been in Sicily before, and was hesitating which
of these various lions was worthy of a second visit,
when the surgeon proposed to me to accompany him
on a visit to a Sicilian Count living in the neighborhood,
who had converted his chateau into a lunatic asylum,
and devoted his time and a large fortune entirely to
this singular hobby. He was the first to try the system,
now, thank God, generally approved, of winning
back reason to these most wretched of human sufferers
by kindness and gentle treatment.
We jumped into one of the rattling calesini standing
in the handsome Corso of Palermo, and fifteen minutes
beyond the gates brought us to the Casa dei Pazzi. My friend's uniform and profession were an immediate
passport, and we were introduced into a handsome
court, surrounded by a colonnade, and cooled by a
fountain, in which were walking several well-dressed
people, with books, drawing-boards, battledores, and
other means of amusement. They all bowed politely
as we passed, and at the door of the interior we were
met by the Count.
“Good God!” I exclaimed, “she was insane,
then!”
It was the old man who was on board the night before!
“E ella?” said I, seizing his arm, before he had concluded
his bow, quite sure that he must understand me
with a word.
“Era pazza.” He looked at me, as he answered,
with a scrutiny, as if he half suspected my friend had
brought him a subject.
The singular character of her beauty was quite explained.
Yet what a wreck!
I followed the old Count around his establishment in
a kind of dream, but I could not avoid being interested
at every step. Here were no chains, no whips, no
harsh keepers, no cells of stone and straw. The walls
of the long corridors were painted in fresco, representing
sunny landscapes, and gay dancing figures. Fountains
and shrubs met us at every turn. The people
were dressed in their ordinary clothes, and all employed
in some light work or amusement. It was like
what it might have been in the days of the Count's ancestors—a
gay chateau, filled with guests and dependants,
with no more apparent constraint than the ties
of hospitality and service.
We went first to the kitchen. Here were ten people,
all, but the cook, stark mad! It was one of the peculiarities
of the Count's system, that his patients led in
his house the lives to which they had previously been
accustomed. A stout Sicilian peasant girl was employed
in filling a large brasier from the basin of a fountain.
While we were watching her task, the fit began
to come on her, and after a fierce look or two around
the room, she commenced dashing the water about her
with great violence. The cook turned, not at all surprised,
and patting her on the back, with a loud laugh,
cried, “Brava, Pepina! brava!” ringing at the same
moment a secret bell.
A young girl of sixteen with a sweet, smiling countenance,
comprehending the case, approached the enraged creature,
and putting her arms affectionately round her
neck, whispered something in her ear. The expression
of her face changed immediately to a look of delight,
and dropping the bucket, she followed the young
attendant out of the room with peals of laughter.
“Venite!” said the count, “you shall see how we
manage our furies.”
We followed across a garden filled with the sweetest
flowers to a small room opening on a lawn. From the
centre of the ceiling was suspended a hammock, and
Pepina was already in it, swung lightly from side to
side by a servant, while the attendant stood by, and, as
if in play, threw water upon her face at every approach.
It had all the air of a frolic. The violent
laughter of the poor maniac grew less and less as the
soothing motion and the coolness of the water took effect,
and in a few minutes her strained eyes gently
closed, the hammock was swung more and more gently,
and she fell asleep.
“This,” said the Count, with a gratified smile, “is
my substitute for a forced shower-bath and chains; and
this,” kissing his little attendant on the forehead, “for
the whip and the grim turnkey.” I blessed him in my
heart.
“Come!” said he, as we left the sleeper to her repose,
“I must show you my grounds.”
We followed him to an extensive garden, opening
from the back of the chateau, laid out originally in the
formal style of an Italian villa. The long walks had
been broken up, however, by beautiful arbors with
grottos in their depths, in which wooden figures, of the
color and size of life, stood or sat in every attitude of
gaiety or grotesqueness. It was difficult, in the deep
shadow of the vines and oleanders, not to believe them
real. We walked on through many a winding shrubbery,
luxuriant climate, continually surprised with little deceptions
of perspective, or figures half concealed in the
leaves, till we emerged at the entrance of a charming
summer theatre, with sodded seats, stage, orchestra,
and scenery complete. Orange trees, roses, and clematis
were laced together for a wall in the rear.
“Here,” said the old man, bounding gaily upon the
stage, “here we act plays the summer long.”
“What! not with your patients?”
“Si Signore! Who else?” And he went on to
describe to us the interest they took in it, and the singular
power with which the odd idea seized upon their
whimsied intellects. We had been accompanied from
the first, by a grave, respectable looking man, whom I
had taken for an assistant. While we were listening to
the description of the first attempt they had made at a
play, he started out from the group, and putting himself
in an attitude upon the stage, commenced spouting
a furious passage in Italian.
The Count pointed to his forehead, and made a sign
to us to listen. The tragedian stopped at the end of
his sentence, and after a moment's delay, apparently
in expectation of a reply, darted suddenly off and disappeared
behind the scenes.
“Poveretto!” said the Count, “it is my best actor!”
Near the theatre stood a small chapel, with a circular
lawn before it, on which the grass had been lately
much trodden. It was surrounded partly by a green
bank, and here the Count seated us, saying, with a significant
look at me, that he would tell us a story.
I should like to give it you in his own words—still
more with his own manner; for never was a tale told
with more elegance of language, or a more natural and
pleasant simplicity. But a sheet of “wire-wove” is not
a Palermitan cavaliere, and the cold English has not
hat, ordered fruit and wine, and proceeded.
“Almost a year ago I was called upon by a gentleman
of a noble physiognomy and address, who inquired
very particularly into my system. I explained
it to him at his request, and he did me the honor, as
you gentlemen have done, to go over my little establishment.
He seemed satisfied, and with some hesitation
informed me that he had a daughter in a very desperate
state of mental alienation. Would I go and see
her?
“This is not, you know, gentlemen, a public institution.
I am crazy,” he said it very gravely, “quite
crazy—the first of my family of fools, on this particular
theme—and this asylum is my toy. Of course it is
only as the whim seizes me that I admit a patient; for
there are some diseases of the brain seated in causes
with which I wish not to meddle.
“However, I went. With the freedom of a physician
I questioned the father, upon the road, of the
girl's history. He was a Greek, a prince of the Fanar,
who had left his degraded people in their dirty and
dangerous suburb at Constantinople, to forget oppression
and meanness in a voluntary exile. It was just
before the breaking out of the last Greek revolution,
and so many of his kinsmen and friends had been sacrificed
to the fury of the Turks, that he had renounced
all idea of ever returning to his country.
“`And your daughter?'
“`My dear Katinka, my only child, fell ill upon receiving
distressing news from the Fanar, and her health
and reason never rallied after. It is now several years,
and she has lain in bed till her limbs are withered,
never having uttered a word, or made a sign which
would indicate even consciousness of the presence of
those about her.'
“I could not get from him that there was any disappointment
to be one of those cases of sudden stupefaction, to
which nervously sensitive minds are liable after a violent
burst of grief; and I began, before I had seen her,
to indulge in bright hopes of starting once more the
sealed fountains of thought and feeling.
“We entered Palermo, and passing out at the other
gate, stopped at a vine-laced casino on the lip of the
bay, scarcely a mile from the city wall. It was a
pretty, fanciful place, and, on a bed in its inner chamber,
lay the most poetical-looking creature I had ever
seen out of my dreams. Her head was pillowed in an
abundance of dark hair, which fell away from her forehead
in masses of glossy curls, relieving with a striking
effect, the wan and transparent paleness of a face which
the divinest chisel could scarce have copied in alabaster.
Dio mio!—how transcendent was the beauty of
that poor girl!”
The Count stopped and fed his memory a moment
with closed eyes upon the image.
“At the first glance I inwardly put up a prayer to
the Virgin, and determined, with her sweet help, to restore
reason to the fairest of its earthly temples. I took
up her shadow of a hand, and spread out the thin fingers
in my palm, and as she turned her large wandering
eye towards me, I felt that the blessed Mary had
heard my prayer, `You shall see her well again,' said I
confidently.
“Quite overcome, the Prince Ghika fell on the bed
and embraced his daughter's knees in an agony of
tears.
“You shall not have the seccatura, gentlemen, of listening
to the recital of all my tedious experiments for
the first month or two. I brought her to my house
upon a litter, placed her in a room filled with every
luxury of the East, and suffered no one to approach
her except two Greek attendants, to whose services she
animation to her benumbed limbs by friction, and made
her sensible of music, and of the perfumes of the East,
which I burned in a pastille-lamp in her chamber.
Here, however, my skill was baffled. I could neither
amuse nor vex. Her mind was beyond me. After
trying every possible experiment, as it seemed to me,
my invention was exhausted, and I despaired.
“She occupied, however, much of my mind. Walking
up and down yonder orange-alley one sweet morning,
about two months ago, I started off suddenly to my
chamber with a new thought. You would have thought
me the maddest of my household, to have seen me,
gentlemen. I turned out by the shoulders the regazza,
who was making my bed, washed and scented myself,
as if for a ball, covered my white hairs with a handsome
brown wig, a relic of my coxcombical days, rouged
faintly, and, with white gloves, and a most youthful
appearance altogether, sought the chamber of my patient.
“She was lying with her head in the hollow of her
thin arm, and, as I entered, her dark eyes rested full
upon me. I approached, kissed her hand with a respectful
gallantry, and in the tenderest tones of which
my damaged voice was susceptible, breathed into her
ear a succession of delicately turned compliments to
her beauty.
“She lay as immovable as marble, but I had not calculated
upon the ruling passion of the sex in vain. A
thin flush in her cheek, and a flutter in her temple,
only perceptible to my practised eye, told me that the
words had found their way to her long-lost consciousness.
“I waited a few moments, and then took up a ringlet
that fell negligently over her hand, and asked permission
to sever it from the glossy mass in which the
arm under her head was literally buried.
“She clutched her fingers suddenly upon it, and
glancing at me with the fury of a roused tigress, exclaimed
in a husky whisper, `Lasciate me, Signore!'
“I obeyed her, and, as I left the room, I thanked
the Virgin in my heart. It was the first word she had
spoken for years.
“The next day, having patched myself up more successfully
in my leisure, in a disguise so absolute that
not one even of my pets knew me as I passed through
the corridor, I bowed myself up once more to her bed-side.
“She lay with her hands clasped over her eyes, and
took no notice of my first salutation. I commenced
with a little raillery, and under cover of finding fault
with her attitude, contrived to pay an adroit compliment
to the glorious orbs she was hiding from admiration.
She lay a moment or two without motion, but the muscles
of her slight mouth stirred just perceptibly, and
presently she drew her fingers quickly apart, and looking
at me with a most confiding expression in her pale
features, a full sweet smile broke like sudden sunshine
through her lips. I could have wept for joy.
“I soon acquired all the influence over her I could
wish. She made an effort at my request to leave her
bed, and in a week or two walked with me in the garden.
Her mind, however, seemed to have capacity
but for one thought, and she soon began to grow unhappy,
and would weep for hours. I endeavored to
draw from her the cause, but she only buried her face
in my bosom, and wept more violently, till one day,
sobbing out her broken words almost inarticulately, I
gathered her meaning. She was grieved that I did not
marry her!
“Poor girl!” soliloquized the Count after a brief
pause, “she was only true to her woman's nature. Insanity
had but removed the veil of custom and restraint.
such a secret, with her reason.
“I was afraid at last she would go melancholy mad,
this one thought preyed so perpetually on her brain—
and I resolved to delude her into the cheerfulness necessary
to her health by a mock ceremony.
“The delight with which she received my promise
almost alarmed me. I made several delays, with the
hope that in the convulsion of her feelings a ray of
reason would break through the darkness; but she
took every hour to heart, and I found it was inevitable.
“You are sitting, gentlemen, in the very scene of our
mad bridal. My poor grass has not yet recovered, you
see, from the tread of the dancers. Imagine the spectacle.
The chapel was splendidly decorated, and at
the bottom of the lawn stood three long tables, covered
with fruits and flowers, and sprinkled here and there
with bottles of colored water, (to imitate wine,) sherbets,
cakes, and other such innocent things as I could
allow my crazy ones. They were all invited.”
“Good God!” said the surgeon, “your lunatics!”
“All! all! And never was such a sensation produced
in a household since the world was created.
Nothing else was talked of for a week. My worst patients
seemed to suspend for the time their fits of violence.
I sent to town for quantities of tricksy stuffs,
and allowed the women to deck themselves entirely
after their own taste. You can conceive nothing like
the business they made of it! Such apparitions!
Santa Maria! shall I ever forget that Babel!
“The morning came. My bride's attendants had
dressed her from her Grecian wardrobe, and with her
long braid parted over her forehead, and hanging back
from her shoulders to her very heels, her close-fitted
jacket, of gorgeous velvet and gold, her costly bracelets,
and the small spangled slippers upon her unstockinged
beauty. Her countenance was thoughtful, but her step
was unusually elastic, and a small red spot, like a rose-leaf
under the skin, blushed through the alabaster paleness
of her cheek.
“My maniacs received her with shouts of admiration.
The women were kept from her at first with great difficulty,
and it was only by drawing their attention to
their own gaudier apparel, that their anxiety to touch
her was distracted. The men looked at her, as she
passed along like a queen of love and beauty, and their
wild, gleaming eyes, and quickened breaths, showed
the effect of such loveliness upon the unconcealed feelings.
I had multiplied my attendants, scarce knowing
how the excitement of the scene might affect them, but
the interest of the occasion, and the imposing decencies
of dress and show, seemed to overcome them effectually.
The most sane guests at a bridal could
scarce have behaved with more propriety.
“The ceremony was performed by an elderly friend
of mine, the physician to my establishment. Old as I
am, gentlemen, I could have wished that ceremony to
have been in earnest. As she lifted up her large liquid
eyes to heaven, and swore to be true to me till death, I
forgot my manhood, and wept. If I had been younger
—ma che porcheria!
“After the marriage the women were invited to salute
the bride, and then all eyes in my natural party
turned at once to the feast. I gave the word. Fruits,
cakes, and sherbets, disappeared with the rapidity of
magic, and then the music struck up from the shrubbery,
and they danced—as you see by the grass.
“I committed the bride to her attendants at sunset,
but I could with difficulty tear myself away. On the
following day I called at her door, but she refused to
see me. The next and the next I could gain no admittance
without exerting my authority. On the
her usual dress, and was sad, calm and gentle.
She said little, but seemed lost in thought to which she
was unwilling or unable to give utterance.
“She has never spoken of it since. Her mind, I
think, has nearly recovered its tone, but her memory
seems confused. I scarce think she remembers her
illness, and its singular events, as more than a troubled
dream. On all the common affairs of life she seems
quite sane, and I drive out with her daily, and have
taken her once or twice to the opera. Last night we
were strolling on the Marina when your frigate came
into the bay, and she proposed to join the crowd and
go off to hear the music. We went on board, as you
know; and now, if you choose to pay your respects to
the lady who refused to waltz with you, take another
sip of your sherbet and wine, and come with me.”
To say more would be trespassing perhaps on the
patience of my readers, but certainly on my own feelings.
I have described this singular case of madness
and its cure, because I think it contains in itself the
seeds of much philosophy on the subject. It is only
within a very few years that these poor sufferers have
been treated otherwise than as the possessors of incarnate
devils, whom it was necessary to scourge out with
unsparing cruelty. If this literal statement of a cure
in the private mad-house of the eccentric Conte —
of Palermo, induce the friends of a single unfortunate
maniac to adopt a kind and rational system for his
restoration, the writer will have been repaid for bringing
circumstances before the public, which have since
had much to do with his own feelings.
MINUTE PHILOSOPHIES.
Was with thee; she who loved us both, she still
Was with thee; and even so didst thou become
A silent poet; from the solitude
Of the vast sea didst bring a watchful heart
Still couchant, an inevitable ear,
And an eye practised like a blind man's touch.
Wordsworth.
A summer or two since, I was wasting a college vacation
among the beautiful creeks and falls in the neighborhood
of New York. In the course of my wanderings,
up stream and down stream, sometimes on foot,
sometimes on horseback, and never without a book for
an excuse to loiter on the mossy banks and beside the
edge of running water, I met frequently a young man
of a peculiarly still and collected eye, and a forehead
more like a broad slab of marble than a human brow.
His mouth was small and thinly cut; his chin had no superfluous
flesh upon it; and his whole appearance was
that of a man, whose intellectual nature prevailed over
the animal. He was evidently a scholar. We had
met so frequently at last, that, on passing each other
one delicious morning, we bowed and smiled simultaneously,
into conversation.
It was a temperate day in August, with a clear but
not oppressive sun, and we wandered down a long
creek together, mineralizing here, botanizing there, and
examining the strata of the ravines, with that sort of
instinctive certainty of each other's attainments, which
scholars always feel, and thrusting in many a little
way-side parenthesis, explanatory of each other's history
and circumstances. I found that he was one of
those pure and unambitious men, who, by close application
and moderate living while in college, become in
love with their books; and, caring little for anything
more than the subsistence, which philosophy tells them
is enough to have of this world, settle down for life
into a wicker-bottomed chair, more contentedly than if
it were the cushion of a throne.
We were together three or four days, and when I
left him, he gave me his address, and promised to write
to me. I shall give below an extract from one of his
letters. I had asked him for a history of his daily
habits, and any incidents which he might choose to
throw in—hinting to him, that I was a dabbler in literature,
and would be obliged to him if he would do it
minutely, and in a form of which I might avail myself
in the way of publication.
After some particulars, unimportant to the reader,
he proceeds:—
“I keep a room at a country tavern. It is a quiet,
out-of-the-way place, with a whole generation of elms
about it; and the greenest grass up to the very door,
and the pleasantest view in the whole country round
from my chamber window. Though it is a public-house,
and the word `Hotel' swings in golden capitals
under a landscape of two hills and a river, painted for
a sign by some wandering Tinto, it is so orderly a
town, that not a lounger is ever seen about the door;
if it were by the very hush of the atmosphere.
“Here, in my pleasant room, upon the second floor,
with my round table covered with choice books, my
shutters closed just so much as to admit light enough
for a painter; and my walls hung with the pictures
which adorned my college chambers, and are therefore
linked with a thousand delightful associations, I can
study my twelve hours a day, in a state of mind sufficiently
even and philosophical. I do not want for excitement.
The animal spirits, thanks to the Creator,
are enough at all times, with employment and temperate
living, to raise us above the common shadows of
life; and after a day of studious confinement, when
my mind is unbound, and I go out and give it up to
reckless association, and lay myself open unreservedly
to the influences of nature—at such a time, there
comes mysteriously upon me a degree of pure joy,
unmingled and unaccountable, which is worth years of
artificial excitement. The common air seems to have
grown rarer; my step is strangely elastic; my sense of
motion full of unwonted dignity; my thoughts elevated;
my perceptions of beauty acuter and more pleasurable;
and my better nature predominant and sublime. There
is nothing in the future which looks difficult, nothing
in my ambition unattainable, nothing in the past which
cannot be reconciled with good; I am a purer and a
better man; and though I am elevated in my own
thoughts, it will not lead to vanity, for my ideas of
God, and of my fellow men, have been enlarged also.
This excitement ceases soon; but it ceases like the
bubbling of a fountain, which leaves the waters purer
for the influence which has passed through them—not
like the mirth of the world, which ebbs like an unnatural
tide, and leaves loathsomeness and disgust.
“Let no one say, that such a mode of life is adapted
to peculiar constitutions, and can be relished by those
and the happiest of fashionable ephemera, and if
he has material for a thought, and can take pride in the
improvement of his nature, I will so order his daily
round, that, with temperance and exercise, he shall be
happier in one hour spent within himself, than in ten
wasted on folly.
“Few know the treasures in their own bosoms—
very few, the elasticity and capacity of a well-regulated
mind for enjoyment. The whole world of philosophers,
and historians, and poets, seem, to the secluded
student, to have labored but for his pleasure; and as he
comes to one new truth and beautiful thought after another,
there answers a chord of joy, richer than music,
in his heart; which spoils him for the coarser pleasures
of the world. I have seen my college chum—a
man, who from a life of mingled business and pleasure,
became suddenly a student—lean back in his chair, at
the triumph of an argument, or the discovery of a philosophical
truth; and give himself up for a few moments
to the enjoyment of sensations, which, he assured
me, surpassed exceedingly the most vivid pleasures
of his life. The mind is like the appetite; when healthy
and well-toned, receiving pleasure from the commonest
food; but becoming a disease, when pampered
and neglected. Give it time to turn in upon itself, satisfy
its restless thirst for knowledge, and it will give
birth to health, to animal spirits, to everything which
invigorates the body, while it is advancing by every
step the capacities of the soul. Oh! if the runners after
pleasure would stoop down by the wayside, they might
drink waters, better even than those which they see
only in their dreams. They will not be told, that they
have in their possession the golden key which they
covet; they will not know, that the music they look to
enchant them, is sleeping in their own untouched instruments;
the enchanter, is burning in their own bosoms!
“When I first came here, my host's eldest daughter
was about twelve years of age. She was, without being
beautiful, an engaging child, rather disposed to be
contemplative, and, like all children at that age, very
inquisitive and curious. She was shy at first, but soon
became acquainted with me; and would come into
my room in her idle hours, and look at my pictures
and read. She never disturbed me, because her natural
politeness forbade it; and I pursued my thoughts
or my studies just as if she were not there, till, by-and-by,
I grew fond of her quiet company, and was happier
when she was moving stealthily around, and looking
into a book here and there, in her quiet way.
“She had been my companion thus for some time,
when it occurred to me that I might be of use to her in
leading her to cultivate a love for study. I seized the
idea enthusiastically. Now, thought I, I will see the
process of a human mind. I have studied its philosophy
from books, and now I will take a single original,
and compare them, step by step. I have seen the bud,
and the flower full blown, and I am told that the change
was gradual, and effected thus---leaf after leaf. Now
I will watch the expansion, and while I water it and
let in the sunshine to its bosom, detect the secret springs
which move to such beautiful results. The idea delighted
me.
“I was aware that there was great drudgery in the
first steps, and I determined to avoid it, and connect
the idea of my own instruction with all that was
delightful and interesting in her mind. For this purpose
I persuaded her father to send her to a better
school than she had been accustomed to attend, and,
by a little conversation, stimulated her to enter upon
her studies with alacrity.
“She was now grown to a girl, and had begun to
age. Her figure had rounded into a flowing symmetry,
and her face, whether from associating principally with
an older person, or for what other reason I know not,
had assumed a thoughtful cast, and she was really a
girl of most interesting and striking personal appearance.
“I did not expect much from the first year of my
experiment. I calculated justly on its being irksome
and common-place. Still, I was amused and interested.
I could hear her light step on the stair, alway at
the same early hour of the evening, and it was a pleasure
to me to say `Come in,' to her timid rap, and set
her a chair by my own, that I might look over her book,
or talk in a low tone to her. I then asked her about
her lessons, and found out what had most attracted her
notice, and I could always find some interesting fact
connected with it, or strike off into some pleasant association,
till she acquired a habit of selection in her
reading, and looked at me earnestly to know what I
would say upon it. You would have smiled to see her
leaning forward, with her soft blue eye fixed on me,
and her lips half parted with attention, waiting for my
ideas upon some bare fact in geography or history;
and it would have convinced you that the natural, unstimulated
mind, takes pleasure in the simplest addition
to its knowledge.
“All this time I kept out of her way every thing
that would have a tendency to destroy a taste for mere
knowledge, and had the pleasure to see that she passed
with keen relish from her text books to my observations,
which were as dry as they, though recommended
by kindness of tone and an interested manner. She
acquired gradually, by this process, a habit of reasoning
upon everything which admitted it, which was afterwards
of great use in fixing and retaining the leading
features of her attainments.
“I proceeded in this way till she was fifteen. Her
mind had now become inured to regular habits of inquiry,
and she began to ask difficult questions and
wonder at common things. Her thoughts assumed a
graver complexion, and she asked for books upon subjects
of which she felt the want of information. She
was ready to receive and appreciate truth and instruction,
and here was to begin my pleasure.
“She came up one evening with an air of embarrassment
approaching to distress. She took her usual
seat, and told me that she had been thinking all day
that it was useless to study any more. There were so
many mysterious things—so much, even that she could
see, which she could not account for, and, with all her
efforts, she got on so slowly, that she was discouraged.
It was better, she said, to be happy in ignorance, than
to be constantly tormented with the sight of knowledge
to which she could not attain, and which she only knew
enough to value. Poor child! she did not know that
she was making the same complaint with Newton, and
Locke, and Bacon, and that the wisest of men were
only `gatherers of pebbles on the shore of an illimitable
sea! I began to talk to her of the mind. I spoke
of its grandeur, and its capacities, and its destiny. I
told her instances of high attainment and wonderful
discovery—sketched the sublime philosophies of the
soul—the possibility that this life was but a link in a
chain of existences, and the glorious power, if it were
true, of entering upon another world, with a loftier capacity
than your fellow-beings for the comprehension
of its mysteries. I then touched upon the duty of self-cultivation—the
pride of a high consciousness of improved
time, and the delicious feelings of self-respect
and true appreciation.
“She listened to me in silence, and wept. It was
one of those periods which occur to all delicate minds,
of distrust and fear; and when it passed by, and her
with a woman's beautiful privilege. I had no more
trouble to urge her on. She began the next day with
the philosophy of the mind, and I was never happier
than while following her from step to step in this delightful
study.
“I have always thought that the most triumphant
intellectual feeling we ever experience, is felt upon the
first opening of philosophy. It is like the interpretation
of a dream of a lifetime. Every topic seems to
you like a phantom of your own mind, from which a
mist has suddenly melted. Every feature has a kind
of half-familiarity, and you remember musing upon it for
hours, till you gave it up with an impatient dissatisfaction.
Without a definite shape, this or that very idea
has floated in your mind continually. It was a phenomenon
without a name—a something which you could
not describe to your friend, and which, by and by, you
came to believe was peculiar to yourself, and would
never be brought out or unravelled. You read on, and
the blood rushes to your face in a tumultuous consciousness—you
have had feelings in peculiar situations
which you could not define, and here are their
very features—and you know, now, that it was jealousy,
or ambition, or love. There have been moments when
your faculties seemed blinded or reversed. You could
not express yourself at all when you felt you should be
eloquent. You could not fix your mind upon the subject,
of which, before, you had been passionately fond.
You felt an aversion for your very partialities, or a
strange warming in your heart toward people or pursuits
that you had disliked; and when the beauty of the
natural world has burst upon you, as it sometimes will,
with an exceeding glory, you have turned away from it
with a deadly sickness of heart, and a wish that you
might die.
“These are mysteries which are not all soluble,
machinery of thought to know its tendencies, and like
the listener to mysterious music, it is enough to have
seen the instrument, without knowing the cunning
craft of the player.
“I remembered my school-day feelings, and lived
them over again with my beautiful pupil. I entered
with as much enthusiasm as she, into the strength and
sublimity which I had wondered at before; and I believe
that, even as she sat reading by herself, my blood
thrilled, and my pulses quickened, as vividly as her
own, when I saw, by the deepening color of her cheek,
or the marked passages of my book, that she had found
a noble thought or a daring hypothesis.
“She proceeded with her course of philosophy rapidly
and eagerly. Her mind was well prepared for
its relish. She said she felt as if a new sense had been
given her—an inner eye which she could turn in upon
herself, and by which she could, as it were, stand aside
while the process of thought went on. She began to
respect and to rely upon her own mind, and the elevation
of countenance and manner, which so certainly
and so beautifully accompanies inward refinement, stole
over her daily. I began to feel respectful in her presence,
and when, with the peculiar elegance of a woman's
mind, she discovered a delicate shade of meaning
which I had not seen, or traced an association
which could spring only from an unsullied heart, I experienced
a sensation like the consciousness of an unseen
presence—elevating, without alarming me.
“It was probably, well, that with all this change in
her mind and manner, her person still retained its childish
grace and flexibility. She had not grown tall, and
she wore her hair yet as she used to do—falling with
a luxuriant fulness upon her shoulders. Hence she
was still a child, when, had she been taller or more
womanly, the demands upon her attention, and the attractiveness
engrossing interest which is necessary to successful
study.
“I have often wished I was a painter; but never so
much as when looking on this beautful being as she sat
absorbed in her studies, or turned to gaze up a moment
to my face, with that delicious expression of inquiry
and affection. Every one knows the elevation given
to the countenance of a man by contemplative habits.
Perhaps the natural delicacy of feminine features has
combined with its rarity, to make this expression less
observable in woman; but, to one familiar with the
study of the human face, there is, in the look of a truly
intellectual women, a keen subtlety of refinement, a
separation from every thing gross and material, which
comes up to our highest dream of the angelic. For
myself, I care not to analyze it. I leave it to philosophy
to find out its secret. It is enough for me that I
can see and feel it in every pulse of my being. It is
not a peculiar susceptibility. Every man who approaches
such a woman feels it. He may not define
it; he may be totally unconscious what it is that awes
him; but he feels as if a mysterious and invisible veil
were about her, and every dark thought is quenched
suddenly in his heart, as if he had come into the atmosphere
of a spirit. I would have every woman
know this. I would tell every mother who prays
nightly for the peculiar watchfulness of good spirits
over the purity of her child, that she may weave round
her a defence stronger than steel—that she may place
in her heart a living amulet whose virtue is like a circle
of fire to pollution. I am not `stringing pearls.' I
have seen, and I know, that an empty mind is not a
strong citadel; and in the melancholy chronicle of female
ruin, the instances are rare of victims distinguished
for mental cultivation. I would my pen were the
`point of a diamond,' and I were writing on living
are its grace and honor—and when I think how the
father and mother that loved her, and the brother that
made her his pride, and the sister in whose bosom she
slept, are all crushed, utterly, by a daughter's degradation,
I feel, that if every word were a burning coal, my
language could not be extravagant!
“My pupil had, as yet, read no poetry. I was uncertain
how to enter upon it. Her taste for the beautiful
in prose had become so decided, that I feared for
the first impression of my poetical world. I wished it
to burst upon her brilliantly—like the entrance to an
inner and more magnificent temple of knowledge. I
hoped to dazzle her with an high and unimagined
beauty, which should exceed far the massive but plain
splendors of philosophy. We had often conversed on
the probability of a previous existence, and, one evening
I opened Wordsworth, and read his sublime `Ode
upon Intimations of Immortality.' She did not interrupt
me, but I looked up at the conclusion, and she
was in tears. I made no remark, but took Byron, and
read some of the finest passages in Childe Harold, and
Manfred, and Cain—and, from that time, poetry has
been her world!
“It would not have have been so earlier. It needs
the simple and strong nutriment of truth to fit us to relish
and feel poetry. The mind must have strength
and cultivated taste, and then it is like a language from
heaven. We are astonished at its power and magnificence.
We have been familiar with knowledge as
with a person of plain garment and a homely presence
—and he comes to us in poetry, with the state of a
king, glorious in purple and gold. We have known
him as an unassuming friend who talked with us by
the wayside, and kept us company on our familiar
paths—and we see him coming with a stately step, and
a glittering diadem on his brow; and we wonder that
and his bearing were fitter for a king!
“Poetry entered to the very soul of Caroline Grey.
It was touching an unreached string, and she felt as if
the whole compass of her heart were given out. I
used to read to her for hours, and it was beautiful to
see her eye kindle, and her cheek burn with excitement.
The sublimed mysticism and spirituality of
Wordsworth were her delight, and she feasted upon
the deep philosophy and half-hidden tenderness of
Coleridge.
“I had observed, with some satisfaction, that, in the
rapid development of her mental powers, she had not
found time to study nature: She knew little of the
character of the material creation, and I now commenced
walking constantly abroad with her at sunset,
and at all the delicious seasons of moonlight and starlight
and dawn. It came in well with her poetry. I
cannot describe the effect. She became, like all who
are, for the first time, made sensible of the glories
around them, a worshipper of the external world.
There is a time when nature first loses its familiarity,
and seems suddenly to have become beautiful.
This is true, even of those who have been taught early
habits of observation. The mind of a child is too feeble
to comprehend, and does not soon learn, the scale of
sublimity and beauty. He would not be surprised if
the sun were brighter, or if the stars were sown thicker
in the sky. He sees that the flower is beautiful, and he
feels admiration at the rainbow; but he would not wonder
if the dyes of the flower were deeper, or if the sky
were laced to the four corners with the colors of a
prism. He grows up with these splendid phenomena
at work about him, till they have become common, and,
in their most wonderful forms, cease to attract his attention.
Then his senses are, suddenly, as by an invisible
influence, unsealed, and, like the proselyte of
temple, and hears exquisite music, and is dazzled
by surpassing glory. He never recovers his indifference.
The perpetual changes of nature keep alive his
enthusiasm, and if his taste is not dulled by subsequent
debasement, the pleasure he receives from it flows on
like a stream—wearing deeper and calmer.
“Caroline became now my constant companion.
The changes of the natural world have always been
my chief source of happiness, and I was curious to
know whether my different sensations, under different
circumstances, were peculiar to myself. I left her,
therefore, to lead the conversation, without any expression
of my feelings, and, to my surprise and delight,
she invariably struck their tone, and pursued the same
vein of reflection. It convinced me of what I had long
thought might be true—that there was, in the varieties
of natural beauty, a hidden meaning and a delightful
purpose of good, and, if I am not deceived, it is a new
and beautiful evidence of the proportion and extent of
God's benevolent wisdom. Thus, you may remember
the peculiar effect of the early dawn—the deep, unruffled
serenity, and the perfect collectedness of your
senses. You may remember the remarkable purity
that pervades the stealing in of color, and the vanishing
of the cold shadows of grey—the heavenly quiet
that seems infused, like a visible spirit, into the pearly
depths of the East, as the light violet tints become
deeper in the upper sky, and the morning mist rises up
like a veil of silvery film, and softens away its intensity;
and then you will remember how the very beatings of
your heart grew quiet, and you felt an irresistible impulse
to pray! There was no irregular delight, no indefinite
sensation, no ecstasy. It was deep, unbroken
repose, and your pulses were free from the fever of
life, and your reason was lying awake in its chamber.
“There is a hush also at noon; but it is not like the
the world, and you turn aside, weary and distracted,
for rest. There is a far depth in the intense blue of
the sky which takes in the spirit, and you are content
to lie down and sleep in the cool shadow, and forget
even your existence. How different from the cool
wakefulness of the morning, and yet how fitted for the
necessity of the hour!
“The day wears on and comes to the sun-setting.
The strong light passes off from the hills, and the
leaves are mingled in golden masses, and the tips of the
long grass, and the blades of maize, and the luxuriant
grain, are all sleeping in a rich glow, as if the daylight
had melted into gold and descended upon every living
thing like dew. The sun goes down, and there is a
tissue of indescribable glory floating upon the clouds,
and the almost imperceptible blending of the sunset
color with the blue sky, is far up towards the zenith.
Presently the pomp of the early sunset passes away;
and the clouds are all clad in purple, with edges of metallic
lustre; and very far in the West, as if they were
sailing away into another world, are seen spots of intense
brightness, and the tall trees on the hilly edge of
the horizon seem piercing the sky, on fire with its consuming
heat. There is a tumultuous joy in the contemplation
of this hour which is peculiar to itself. You
feel as if you should have had wings; for there is a
strange stirring in your heart to follow on—and your
imagination bursts away into that beautiful world, and
revels among the unsubstantial clouds till they become
cold. It is a triumphant and extravagant hour. Its
joyousness is an intoxication, and its pleasure dies with
the day.
“The night, starry and beautiful, comes on. The
sky has a blue, intense almost to blackness, and the
stars are set in it like gems. They are of different
glory, and there are some that burn, and some that
faint. You know their nature, and their motion; and
there is something awful in so many worlds moving on
through the firmament so silently and in order. You
feel an indescribable awe stealing upon you, and your
imagination trembles as it goes up among them. You
gaze on, and on, and the superstitions of olden time,
and the wild visions of astrology steal over your memory,
till, by and by, you hear the music which they
`give out as they go,' and drink in the mysteries of their
hidden meaning, and believe that your destiny is woven
by their burning spheres. There comes on you a delirious
joy, and a kind of terrible fellowship with their
sublime nature, and you feel as if you could go up to a
starry place and course the heavens in company.
There is a spirituality in this hour, a separation from
material things, which is of a fine order of happiness.
The purity of the morning, and the noontide quietness,
and the rapture of the glorious sunset, are all human
and comprehensible feelings; but this has the mystery
and the lofty energy of a higher world, and you return
to your human nature with a refreshed spirit and an
elevated purpose—See now the wisdom of God!—the
collected intellect for the morning prayer and our daily
duty—the delicious repose for our noontide weariness,
and the rapt fervor to purify us by night from our
worldliness, and keep wakeful the eye of immortality!
They are all suited to our need; and it is pleasant to
think, when we go out at this or that season, that its
peculiar beauty is fitted to our peculiar wants, and that
it is not a chance harmony of our hearts with nature.
“The world had become to Caroline a new place.
No change in the season was indifferent to her—nothing
was common or familiar. She found beauty in
things you would pass by, and a lesson for her mind or
her heart in the minutest workmanship of nature. Her
character assumed a cheerful dignity, and an elevation
equable and calm, because her feelings were never
reached by ordinary irritations, and, if there were no
other benefit in cultivation, this were almost argument
enough to induce it.
“It is now five years since I commenced my tutorship.
I have given you the history of two of them. In
the remaining three there has been much that has interested
my mind—probably little that would interest
yours. We have read together, and, as far as possible,
studied together. She has walked with me, and shared
all my leisure and known every thought. She is now a
woman of eighteen. Her childish graces are matured,
and her blue eye would send a thrill through you. You
might object to her want of fashionable tournure, and
find fault with her unfashionable impulses. I do not.
She is a high-minded, noble, impassioned being—with
an enthusiasm that is not without reason, and a common
sense that is not a regard to self-interest. Her
motion was not learnt at schools, but it is unembarrassed
and free; and her tone has not been educated to a
refined whisper, but it expresses the meaning of her
heart, as if its very pulse had become articulate. The
many might not admire her—I know she would be
idolized by the few.
“Our intercourse is as intimate still; and it could
not change without being less so—for we are constantly
together. There is—to be sure—lately—a
slight degree of embarrassment—and—somehow—we
read more poetry than we used to do—but it is nothing
at all—nothing.”
My friend was married to his pupil a few months
after writing the foregoing. He has written to me
since, and I will show you the letter if you will call, any
time. It will not do to print it, because there are some
domestic details not proper for the general eye; but,
interesting to the last degree. He lives the same quiet,
retired life, that he did before he was married. His
room is arranged with the same taste, and with reference
to the same habits as before. The light comes in
as timidly through the half-closed window, and his pictures
look as shadowy and dim, and the rustle of the
turned leaf adds as mysteriously to the silence. He is
the fondest of husbands, but his affection does not encroach
on the habits of his mind. Now and then he
looks up from his book, and, resting his head upon his
hand, lets his eye wander over the pale cheek and
drooping lid of the beautiful being who sits reading beside
him; but he soon returns to his half-forgotten
page, and the smile of affection which had stolen over
his features fades gradually away into the habitual
soberness of thought. There sits his wife, hour after
hour, in the same chair which she occupied when she
first came, a curious loiterer to his room; and though
she does not study so much, because other cares
have a claim upon her now, she still keeps pace with
him in the pleasanter branches of knowledge, and
they talk as often and as earnestly as before on the
thousand topics of a scholar's contemplation. Her
cares may and will multiply; but she understands the
economy of time, and I have no doubt that, with every
attention to her daily duties, she will find ample time for
her mind, and be always as well fitted as now for the
companionship of an intellectual being.
I have, like all bachelors, speculated a great deal upon
matrimony. I have seen young and beautiful women,
the pride of gay circles, married—as the world
said—well! Some have moved into costly houses, and
their friends have all come and looked at their fine
furniture and their splendid arrangements for happiness,
and they have gone away and committed them to
their sunny hopes, cheerfully, and without fear. It is
times, I am carried away by similar feelings. I love to
get unobserved into a corner, and watch the bride in
her white attire, and with her smiling face and her soft
eyes moving before me in their pride of life, weave a
waking dream of her future happiness, and persuade
myself that it will be true. I think how they will sit
upon that luxurious sofa as the twilight falls, and build
gay hopes, and murmur in low tones the now unforbidden
tenderness, and how thrillingly the allowed kiss
and the beautiful endearments of wedded life, will make
even their parting joyous, and how gladly they will
come back from the crowd and the empty mirth of the
gay, to each other's quiet company. I picture to myself
that young creature, who blushes even now, at his
hesitating caress, listening eagerly for his footsteps as
the night steals on, and wishing that he would come;
and when he enters at last, and, with an affection as
undying as his pulse, folds her to his bosom, I can feel
the very tide that goes flowing through his heart, and
gaze with him on her graceful form as she moves about
him for the kind offices of affection, soothing all his unquiet
cares, and making him forget even himself, in
her young and unshadowed beauty.
I go forward for years, and see her luxuriant hair
put soberly away from her brow, and her girlish graces
ripenened into dignity, and her bright loveliness
chastened with the gentle meekness of maternal affection.
Her husband looks on her with a proud eye,
and shows the same fervent love and delicate attention
which first won her, and fair children are growing up
about them, and they go on, full of honor and untroubled
years, and are remembered when they die!
I say I love to dream thus when I go to give the
young bride joy. It is the natural tendency of feelings
touched by lovliness that fears nothing for itself, and,
if I ever yield to darker feelings, it is because the light
on such changes, and I will not, minutely, now. I allude
to it only because I trust that my simple page will
be read by some of the young and beautiful beings who
move daily across my path, and I would whisper
them as they glide by, joyously and confidingly, the secret
of an unclouded future.
The picture I have drawn above is not peculiar. It
is colored like the fancies of the bride; and many—oh
many an hour will she sit, with her rich jewels lying
loose in her fingers, and dream such dreams as these.
She believes them, too—and she goes on, for a while
undeceived. The evening is not too long while they
talk of their plans for happiness, and the quiet meal
still pleasant with the delightful novelty of mutual reliance
and attention. There comes soon, however, a
time when personal topics become bare and wearisome
and slight attentions will not alone keep up the social
excitement. There are long intervals of silence, and
detected symptoms of weariness, and the husband, first
in his impatient manhood, breaks in upon the hours
they were to spend together. I cannot follow it circumstantially.
There come long hours of unhappy
listlessness, and terrible misgivings of each other's worth
and affection, till, by-and-by, they can conceal their
uneasiness no longer, and go out separately to seek relief,
and lean upon a hollow world for the support which
one who was their “lover and friend” could not give
them!
Heed this, ye who are winning by your innocent
beauty, the affections of high-minded and thinking
beings! Remember that he will give up the brothers
of his heart with whom he has had, ever, a fellowship
of mind—the society of his cotemporary runners in
the race of fame, who have held with him a stern companionship—and
frequently, in his passionate love, he
will break away from the arena of his burning ambition
will bewilder him at first, but it will not long; and then,
think you that an idle blandishment will chain the mind
that has been used, for years, to an equal communion?
Think you he will give up, for a weak dalliance, the
animating themes of men, and the search into the fine
mysteries of knowledge!—Oh! no, lady!—believe
me—no! Trust not your influence to such light fetters!
Credit not the old-fashioned absurdity that woman's
is a secondary lot—ministering to the necessities
of her lord and master! It is a higher destiny I would
award you. If your immortality is as complete, and
your gift of mind as capable as ours of increase and
elevation, I would put no wisdom of mine against God's
evident allotment. I would charge you to water the
undying bud, and give it healthy culture, and open its
beauty to the sun—and then you may hope, that when
your life is bound up with another, you will go on
equally, and in a fellowship that shall pervade every
earthly interest!
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