Pencillings by the Way Part 26

Lombardy is full of nightingales. They sing by day, however (as not specified in poetry). They are up quite as early as the lark, and the green hedges are alive with their gurgling and changeful music till twilight. Nothing can exceed the fertility of these endless plains.

They are four or five hundred miles of uninterrupted garden. The same eternal level road, the same rows of elms and poplars on either side, the same long, slimy ca.n.a.ls, the same square, vine-laced, perfectly green pastures and cornfields, the same shaped houses, the same-voiced beggars with the same sing-song whine, and the same villanous Austrians poring over your pa.s.sports and asking to be paid for it, from the Alps to the Apennines. It is wearisome, spite of green leaves and nightingales. A bare rock or a good brigand-looking mountain would so refresh the eye!

At Placenza, one of those admirable German bands was playing in the public square, while a small corps of picked men were manoeuvred.

Even an Italian, I should think, though he knew and felt it was the music of his oppressors, might have been pleased to listen. And pleased they seemed to be--for there were hundreds of dark-haired and well-made men, with faces and forms for heroes, standing and keeping time with the well-played instruments, as peacefully as if there were no such thing as liberty, and no meaning in the foreign uniforms crowding them from their own pavement. And there were the women of Placenza, nodding from the balconies to the white mustaches and padded coats strutting below, and you would never dream Italy thought herself wronged, watching the exchange of courtesies between her dark-eyed daughters and these fair-haired c.o.xcombs.

We crossed the Po, and entered Austria's _nominal_ dominions. They rummaged our baggage as if they smelt republicanism somewhere, and after showing a strong disposition to retain a volume of very bad poetry as suspicious, and detaining us two long hours, they had the modesty to ask to be paid for letting us off lightly. When we declined it, the _chef_ threatened us a precious searching "_the next time_." How willingly I would submit to the annoyance to have that _next time_ a.s.sured to me! Every step I take toward the bounds of Italy, pulls so upon my heart!

As most travellers come into Italy over the Simplon, Milan makes generally the first enthusiastic chapter in their books. I have reversed the order myself, and have a better right to praise it from comparison. For exterior, there is certainly no city in Italy comparable to it. The streets are broad and n.o.ble, the buildings magnificent, the pavement quite the best in Europe, and the Milanese (all of whom I presume I have seen, for it is Sunday, and the streets swarm with them), are better dressed, and look "better to do in the world" than the Tuscans, who are gayer and more Italian, and the Romans, who are graver and vastly handsomer. Milan is quite like Paris. The showy and mirror-lined _cafes_, the elegant shops, the variety of strange people and costumes, and a new gallery lately opened in imitation of the gla.s.s-roofed _pa.s.sages_ of the French capital, make one almost feel that the next turn will bring him upon the Boulevards.

The famous cathedral, nearly completed by Napoleon, is a sort of Aladdin creation, quite too delicate and beautiful for the open air.

The filmly traceries of gothic fretwork, the needle-like minarets, the hundreds of beautiful statues with which it is studded, the intricate, graceful, and bewildering architecture of every window and turret, and the frost-like frailness and delicacy of the whole ma.s.s, make an effect altogether upon the eye that must stand high on the list of new sensations. It is a vast structure withal, but a middling easterly breeze, one would think in looking at it, would lift it from its base and bear it over the Atlantic like the meshes of a cobweb. Neither interior nor exterior impresses you with the feeling of awe common to other large churches. The sun struggles through the immense windows of painted gla.s.s, staining every pillar and carved cornice with the richest hues, and wherever the eye wanders it grows giddy with the wilderness of architecture. The people on their knees are like paintings in the strong artificial light, the checkered pavement seems trembling with a quivering radiance, the altar is far and indistinct, and the lamps burning over the tomb of Saint Carlo, shine out from the centre like gems glistening in the midst of some enchanted hall. This reads very like rhapsody, but it is the way the place impressed me. It is like a great dream. Its excessive beauty scarce seems constant while the eye rests upon it.

The _Brera_ is a n.o.ble palace, occupied by the public galleries of statuary and painting. I felt on leaving Florence that I could give pictures a very long holyday. To live on them, as one does in Italy, is like dining from morn till night. The famous Guercino, is at Milan, however, the "Hagar," which Byron talks of so enthusiastically, and I once more surrendered myself to a cicerone. The picture catches your eye on your first entrance. There is that harmony and effect in the color that mark a masterpiece, even in a pa.s.sing glance. Abraham stands in the centre of the group, a fine, prophet-like, "green old man," with a mild decision in his eye, from which there is evidently no appeal. Sarah has turned her back, and you can just read in the half-profile glance of her face, that there is a little pity mingled in her hard-hearted approval of her rival's banishment. But Hagar--who can describe the world of meaning in her face? The closed lips have in them a calm incredulousness, contradicted with wonderful nature in the flushed and troubled forehead, and the eyes red with long weeping.

The gourd of water is hung over her shoulder, her hand is turning her sorrowful boy from the door, and she has looked back once more, with a large tear coursing down her cheek, to read in the face of her master if she is indeed driven forth for ever. It is the instant before pride and despair close over her heart. You see in the picture that the next moment is the crisis of her life. Her gaze is straining upon the old man's lips, and you wait breathlessly to see her draw up her bending form, and depart in proud sorrow for the wilderness. It is a piece of powerful and pa.s.sionate poetry. It affects you like nothing but a reality. The eyes get warm, and the heart beats quick, and as you walk away you feel as if a load of oppressive sympathy was lifting from your heart.

I have seen little else in Milan, except Austrian soldiers, of whom there are fifteen thousand in this single capital! The government has issued an order to officers not on duty, to appear in citizen's dress, it is supposed, to diminish the appearance of so much military preparation. For the rest, they make a kind of coffee here, by boiling it with cream, which is better than anything of the kind either in Paris or Constantinople; and the Milanese are, for slaves, the most civil people I have seen, after the Florentines. There is little English society here; I know not why, except that the Italians are rich enough to be exclusive and make their houses difficult of access to strangers.

LETTER LXIII.

A MELANCHOLY PROCESSION--LAGO MAGGIORE--ISOLA BELLA--THE SIMPLON--MEETING A FELLOW-COUNTRYMAN--THE VALLEY OF THE RHONE.

In going out of the gates of Milan, we met a cart full of peasants, tied together and guarded by _gens d'armes_, the fifth sight of the kind that has crossed us since we pa.s.sed the Austrian border. The poor fellows looked very innocent and very sorry. The extent of their offences probably might be the want of a pa.s.sport, and a desire to step over the limits of his majesty's possessions. A train of beautiful horses, led by soldiers along the ramparts, the property of the Austrian officers, were in melancholy contrast to their sad faces.

The clear snowy Alps soon came in sight, and their cold beauty refreshed us in the midst of a heat that prostrated every nerve in the system. It is only the first of May, and they are mowing the gra.s.s everywhere on the road, the trees are in their fullest leaf, the frogs and nightingales singing each other down, and the gra.s.shopper would be a burden. Toward night we crossed the Sardinian frontier, and in an hour were set down at an auberge on the bank of Lake Maggiore, in the little town of Arona. The mountains on the other side of the broad and mirror-like water, are speckled with ruined castles, here and there a boat is leaving its long line of ripples behind in its course, the cattle are loitering home, the peasants sit on the benches before their doors, and all the lovely circ.u.mstances of a rural summer's sunset are about us, in one of the very loveliest spots in nature. A very old Florence friend is my companion, and what with mutual reminiscences of sunny Tuscany, and the deepest love in common for the sky over our heads, and the green land around us, we are noting down "red days" in our calendar of travel.

We walked from Arona by sunrise, four or five miles along the borders of Lake Maggiore. The kind-hearted peasants on their way to the market raised their hats to us in pa.s.sing, and I was happy that the greeting was still "_buon giorno_." Those dark-lined mountains before us were to separate me too soon from the mellow accents in which it was spoken. As yet, however, it was all Italian--the ultra-marine sky, the clear, half-purpled hills, the inspiring air--we felt in every pulse that it was still Italy.

We were at Baveno at an early hour, and took a boat for _Isola Bella_.

It looks like a gentleman's villa afloat. A boy would throw a stone entirely over it in any direction. It strikes you like a kind of toy as you look at it from a distance, and getting nearer, the illusion scarcely dissipates--for, from the water's edge, the orange-laden terraces are piled one above another like a pyramidal fruit-basket, the villa itself peers above like a sugar castle, and it scarce seems real enough to land upon. We pulled round to the northern side, and disembarked at a broad stone staircase, where a cicerone, with a look of suppressed wisdom, common to his vocation, met us with the offer of his services.

The entrance-hall was hung with old armor, and a magnificent suite of apartments above, opening on all sides upon the lake, was lined thickly with pictures, none of them remarkable except one or two landscapes by the savage Tempesta. Travellers going the other way would probably admire the collection more than we. We were glad to be handed over by our pragmatical custode to a pretty contadina, who announced herself as the gardener's daughter, and gave us each a bunch of roses. It was a proper commencement to an acquaintance upon Isola Bella. She led the way to the water's edge, where, in the foundations of the palace, a suite of eight or ten s.p.a.cious rooms is constructed _a la grotte_--with a pavement laid of small stones of different colors, walls and roof of fantastically set sh.e.l.ls and pebbles, and statues that seem to have reason in their nudity. The only light came in at the long doors opening down to the lake, and the deep leather sofas, and dark cool atmosphere, with the light break of the waves outside, and the long views away toward Isola Madra, and the far-off opposite sh.o.r.e, composed altogether a most seductive spot for an indolent humor and a summer's day. I shall keep it as a cool recollection till sultry summers trouble me no more.

But the garden was the prettiest place. The lake is lovely enough any way; but to look at it through perspectives of orange alleys, and have the blue mountains broken by stray branches of tulip-trees, clumps of crimson rhododendron, and cl.u.s.ters of citron, yellower than gold; to sit on a garden-seat in the shade of a thousand roses, with sweet-scented shrubs and verbenums, and a mixture of novel and delicious perfumes embalming the air about you, and gaze up at snowy Alps and sharp precipices, and down upon a broad smooth mirror in which the islands lie like clouds, and over which the boats are silently creeping with their white sails, like birds asleep in the sky--why (not to disparage nature), it seems to my poor judgment, that these artificial appliances are an improvement even to Lago Maggiore.

On one side, without the villa walls, are two or three small houses, one of which is occupied as a hotel; and here, if I had a friend with matrimony in his eye, would I strongly recommend lodgings for the honeymoon. A prettier cage for a pair of billing doves no poet would conceive you.

We got on to Domo d'Ossola to sleep, saying many an oft-said thing about the entrance to the valleys of the Alps. They seem common when spoken of, these romantic places, but they are not the less new in the glow of a first impression.

We were a little in start of the sun this morning, and commenced the ascent of the Simplon by a gray summer's dawn, before which the last bright star had not yet faded. From Domo d'Ossola we rose directly into the mountains, and soon wound into the wildest glens by a road which was flung along precipices and over chasms and waterfalls like a waving riband. The horses went on at a round trot, and so skilfully are the difficulties of the ascent surmounted, that we could not believe we had pa.s.sed the spot that from below hung above us so appallingly. The route follows the foaming river Vedro, which frets and plunges along at its side or beneath its hanging bridges, with the impetuosity of a mountain torrent, where the stream is swollen at every short distance with pretty waterfalls, messengers from the melting snows on the summits. There was one, a water-_slide_ rather than a fall, which I stopped long to admire. It came from near the peak of the mountain, leaping at first from a green clump of firs, and descending a smooth inclined plane, of perhaps two hundred feet.

The effect was like drapery of the most delicate lace, dropping into festoons from the hand. The slight waves overtook each other and mingled and separated, always preserving their elliptical and foaming curves, till, in a smooth scoop near the bottom, they gathered into a snowy ma.s.s, and leaped into the Vedro in the shape of a twisted sh.e.l.l.

If wishing could have witched it into Mr. Cole's sketch-book, he would have a new variety of water for his next composition.

After seven hours' driving, which scarce seemed ascending but for the snow and ice and the clear air it brought us into, we stopped to breakfast at the village of Simplon, "three thousand, two hundred and sixteen feet above the sea level." Here we first realized that we had left Italy. The landlady spoke French and the postillions German! My sentiment has grown threadbare with travel, but I don't mind confessing that the circ.u.mstance gave me an unpleasant thickness in the throat. I threw open the southern window, and looked back toward the marshes of Lombardy, and if I did not say the poetical thing, it was because

"It is the silent grief that cuts the heart-strings."

In sober sadness, one may well regret any country where his life has been filled fuller than elsewhere of sunshine and gladness; and such, by a thousand enchantments, has Italy been to me. Its climate is life in my nostrils, its hills and valleys are the poetry of such things, and its marbles, pictures, and palaces, beset the soul like the very necessities of existence. You can exist elsewhere, but oh! you _live_ in Italy!

I was sitting by my English companion on a sledge in front of the hotel, enjoying the sunshine, when the diligence drove up, and six or eight young men alighted. One of them, walking up and down the road to get the cramp of a confined seat out of his legs, addressed a remark to us in English. We had neither of us seen him before, but we exclaimed simultaneously, as he turned away, "That's an American."

"How did you know he was not an Englishman?" I asked. "Because," said my friend, "he spoke to us without an introduction and without a reason, as Englishmen are not in the habit of doing, and because he ended his sentence with 'sir,' as no Englishman does except he is talking to an inferior, or wishes to insult you. And how did you know it?" asked he. "Partly by instinct," I answered, "but more, because though a traveller, he wears a new hat that cost him ten dollars, and a new cloak that cost him fifty, (a peculiarly American extravagance,) because he made no inclination of his body either in addressing or leaving us, though his intention was to be civil, and because he used fine dictionary words to express a common idea, which, by the way, too, betrays his southern breeding. And if you want other evidence, he has just asked the gentleman near him to ask the conducteur something about his breakfast, and an American is the only man in the world who ventures to come abroad without at least French enough to keep himself from starving." It may appear ill-natured to write down such criticisms on one's own countryman; but the national peculiarities by which we are distinguished from foreigners, seemed so well defined in this instance, that I thought it worth mentioning. We found afterward that our conjecture was right. His name and country were on the bra.s.s plate of his portmanteau in most legible letters, and I recognized it directly as the address of an amiable and excellent man, of whom I had once or twice heard in Italy, though I had never before happened to meet him. Three of the faults oftenest charged upon our countrymen, are _over-fine clothes_, _over fine-words_, and _over-fine_, or _over-free manners_!

From Simplon we drove two or three miles between heaps of snow, lying in some places from ten to six feet deep. Seven hours before, we had ridden through fields of grain almost ready for the harvest. After pa.s.sing one or two galleries built over the road to protect it from the avalanches where it ran beneath the loftier precipices, we got out of the snow, and saw Brig, the small town at the foot of the Simplon, on the other side, lying almost directly beneath us. It looked as if one might toss his cap down into its pretty gardens. Yet we were four or five hours in reaching it, by a road that seemed in most parts scarcely to descend at all. The views down the valley of the Rhone, which opened continually before us, were of exquisite beauty, The river itself, which is here near its source, looked like a meadow rivulet in its silver windings, and the gigantic Helvetian Alps which rose in their snow on the other side of the valley, were glittering in the slant rays of a declining sun, and of a grandeur of size and outline which diminished, even more than distance, the river and the cl.u.s.ters of villages at their feet.

LETTER LXIV.

SWITZERLAND--LA VALAIS--THE CRETINS AND THE GOITRES--A FRENCHMAN'S OPINION OF NIAGARA--LAKE LEMAN--CASTLE OF CHILLON--ROCKS OF MEILLERIE--REPUBLICAN AIR--MONT BLANC--GENEVA--THE STEAMER--PARTING SORROW.

We have been two days and a half loitering down through the Swiss canton of Valais, and admiring every hour the magnificence of these snow-capped and green-footed Alps. The little chalets seem just lodged by accident on the crags, or stuck against slopes so steep, that the mowers of the mountain-gra.s.s are literally let down by ropes to their dizzy occupation. The goats alone seem to have an exemption from all ordinary laws of gravitation, feeding against cliffs which it makes one giddy to look on only; and the short-waisted girls dropping a courtesy and blushing as they pa.s.s the stranger, emerge from the little mountain-paths, and stop by the first spring, to put on their shoes and arrange their ribands coquetishly, before entering the village.

The two dreadful curses of these valleys meet one at every step--the _cretins_, or natural fools, of which there is at least one in every family; and the _goitre_ or swelled throat, to which there is hardly an exception among the women. It really makes travelling in Switzerland a melancholy business, with all its beauty; at every turn in the road, a gibbering and moaning idiot, and in every group of females, a disgusting array of excrescences too common even to be concealed. Really, to see girls that else were beautiful, arrayed in all their holyday finery, but with a defect that makes them monsters to the unaccustomed eye, their throats swollen to the size of their heads, seems to me one of the most curious and pitiable things I have met in my wanderings. Many attempts have been made to account for the growth of the _goitre_, but it is yet unexplained. The men are not so subject to it as the women, though among them, even, it is frightfully common. But how account for the continual production by ordinary parents of this brute race of _cretins_? They all look alike, dwarfish, large-mouthed, grinning, and of hideous features and expression. It is said that the children of strangers, born in the valley, are very likely to be idiots, resembling the cretin exactly.

It seems a supernatural curse upon the land. The Valaisians, however, consider it a blessing to have one in the family.

The dress of the women of La Valais is excessively unbecoming, and a pretty face is rare. Their manners are kind and polite, and at the little _auberges_, where we have stopped on the road, there has been a cleanliness and a generosity in the supply of the table, which prove virtues among them, not found in Italy.

At Turtmann, we made a little excursion into the mountains to see a cascade. It falls about a hundred feet, and has just now more water than usual from the melting of the snows. It is a pretty fall. A Frenchman writes in the book of the hotel, that he has seen Niagara and Trenton Falls, in America, and that they do not compare with the cascade of Turtmann!

From Martigny the scenery began to grow richer, and after pa.s.sing the celebrated Fall of the p.i.s.sevache (which springs from the top of a high Alp almost into the road, and is really a splendid cascade), we approached Lake Leman in a gorgeous sunset. We rose a slight hill, and over the broad sheet of water on the opposite sh.o.r.e, reflected with all its towers in a mirror of gold, lay the _castle of Chillon_. A bold green mountain, rose steeply behind, the sparkling village of Vevey lay farther down on the water's edge; and away toward the sinking sun, stretched the long chain of the Jura, teinted with all the hues of a dolphin. Never was such a lake of beauty--or it never sat so pointedly for its picture. Mountains and water, chateaux and shallops, vineyards and verdure, could do no more. We left the carriage and walked three or four miles along the southern bank, under the "Rocks of Meillerie," and the spirit of St. Preux's Julie, if she haunt the scene where she caught her death, of a sunset in May, is the most enviable of ghosts. I do not wonder at the prating in alb.u.ms of Lake Leman. For me, it is (after Val d'Arno from Fiesoli) the _ne plus ultra_ of a scenery Paradise.

We are stopping for the night at St. Gingoulf, on a swelling bank of the lake, and we have been lying under the trees in front of the hotel till the last perceptible teint is gone from the sky over Jura. Two pedestrian gentlemen, with knapsacks and dogs, have just arrived, and a whole family of French people, including parrots and monkeys, came in before us, and are deafening the house with their chattering. A cup of coffee, and then good night!

My companion, who has travelled all over Europe on foot, confirms my opinion that there is no drive on the continent, equal to the forty miles between the rocks of Meillerie and Geneva, on the southern bank of the Leman. The lake is not often much broader than the Hudson, the sh.o.r.es are the n.o.ble mountains sung so gloriously by Childe Harold; Vevey, Lausanne, Copet, and a string of smaller villages, all famous in poetry and story, fringe the opposite water's edge with cottages and villages, while you wind for ever along a green lane following the bend of the sh.o.r.e, the road as level as your hall pavement, and green hills ma.s.sed up with trees and verdure, overshadowing you continually.

The world has a great many sweet spots in it, and I have found many a one which would make fitting scenery for the brightest act of life's changeful drama--but here is one, where it seems to me as difficult not to feel genial and kindly, as for Taglioni to keep from floating away like a smoke-curl when she is dancing in La Bayadere.

We pa.s.sed a bridge and drew in a long breath to try the difference in the air--we were in the _republic_ of Geneva. It smelt very much as it did in the dominions of his majesty of Sardinia--sweet-briar, hawthorn, violets and all. I used to think when I first came from America, that the flowers (republicans by nature as well as birds) were less fragrant under a monarchy.

Mont Blanc loomed up very white in the south, but like other distinguished persons of whom we form an opinion from the description of poets, the "monarch of mountains" did not seem to me so _very_ superior to his fellows. After a look or two at him as we approached Geneva, I ceased straining my head out of the cabriolet, and devoted my eyes to things more within the scale of my affections--the scores of lovely villas sprinkling the hills and valleys by which we approached the city. Sweet--sweet places they are to be sure! And then the month is May, and the straw-bonneted and white-ap.r.o.ned girls, ladies and peasants alike, were all out at their porches and balconies, lover-like couples were sauntering down the park-lanes, _one_ servant pa.s.sed us with a tri-cornered blue billet-doux between his thumb and finger, the nightingales were singing their very hearts away to the new-blown roses, and a sense of summer and seventeen, days of sunshine and sonnet-making, came over me irresistibly. I should like to see June out in Geneva.

The little steamer that makes the tour of Lake Leman, began to "phiz"

by sunrise directly under the windows of our hotel. We were soon on the pier, where our entrance into the boat was obstructed by a weeping cl.u.s.ter of girls, embracing and parting very unwillingly with a young lady of some eighteen years, who was lovely enough to have been wept for by as many grown-up gentlemen. Her own tears were under better government, though her sealed lips showed that she dared not trust herself with her voice. After another and another lingering kiss, the boatman expressed some impatience, and she tore herself from their arms and stepped into the waiting batteau. We were soon along side the steamer, and sooner under way, and then, having given one wave of her handkerchief to the pretty and sad group on the sh.o.r.e, our fair fellow-pa.s.senger gave way to her feelings, and sinking upon a seat, burst into a pa.s.sionate flood of tears. There was no obtruding on such sorrow, and the next hour or two were employed by my imagination in filling up the little drama, of which we had seen but the touching conclusion.

I was pleased to find the boat (a new one) called the "Winkelreid," in compliment to the vessel which makes the same voyage in Cooper's "Headsman of Berne." The day altogether had begun like a chapter in a romance.

"Lake Leman wooed us with its crystal face,"

but there was the filmiest conceivable veil of mist over its unruffled mirror, and the green uplands that rose from its edge had a softness like dreamland upon their verdure. I know not whether the tearful girl whose head was drooping over the railing felt the sympathy, but I could not help thanking nature for her, in my heart, the whole scene was so of the complexion of her own feelings. I could have "thrown my ring into the sea," like Policrates Samius, "to have cause for sadness too."

The "Winkelreid" has (for a republican steamer), rather the aristocratical arrangement of making those who walk _aft_ the funnel pay twice as much as those who choose to promenade _forward_--for no earthly reason that I can divine, other than that those who pay dearest have the full benefit of the oily gases from the machinery, while the humbler pa.s.senger breathes the air of heaven before it has pa.s.sed through that improving medium. Our youthful Niobe, two French ladies not particularly pretty, an Englishman with a fishing-rod and gun, and a c.o.xcomb of a Swiss artist to whom I had taken a special aversion at Rome, from a criticism I overheard upon my favorite picture in the Colonna, my friends and myself, were the exclusive inhalers of the oleaginous atmosphere of the stern. A crowd of the ark's own miscellaneousness thronged the forecastle--and so you have the programme of a day on Lake Leman.