CHAPTER 1.V.
Quello Ippogifo, grande e strano augello
Lo porta via.
"Orlando Furioso," c. vi. xviii.
(That hippogriff, great and marvellous bird, bears him away.)
And now, accompanying this mysterious Zanoni, am I compelled to
bid a short farewell to Naples. Mount behind me,--mount on my
hippogriff, reader; settle yourself at your ease. I bought the
pillion the other day of a poet who loves his comfort; it has
been newly stuffed for your special accommodation. So, so, we
ascend! Look as we ride aloft,--look!--never fear, hippogriffs
never stumble; and every hippogriff in Italy is warranted to
carry elderly gentlemen,--look down on the gliding landscapes!
There, near the ruins of the Oscan's old Atella, rises Aversa,
once the stronghold of the Norman; there gleam the columns of
Capua, above the Vulturnian Stream. Hail to ye, cornfields and
vineyards famous for the old Falernian! Hail to ye, golden
orange-groves of Mola di Gaeta! Hail to ye, sweet shrubs and
wild flowers, omnis copia narium, that clothe the mountain-skirts
of the silent Lautulae! Shall we rest at the Volscian Anxur,--
the modern Terracina,--where the lofty rock stands like the giant
that guards the last borders of the southern land of love? Away,
away! and hold your breath as we flit above the Pontine Marshes.
Dreary and desolate, their miasma is to the gardens we have
passed what the rank commonplace of life is to the heart when it
has left love behind.
Mournful Campagna, thou openest on us in majestic sadness. Rome,
seven-hilled Rome! receive us as Memory receives the way-worn;
receive us in silence, amidst ruins! Where is the traveller we
pursue? Turn the hippogriff loose to graze: he loves the
acanthus that wreathes round yon broken columns. Yes, that is
the arch of Titus, the conqueror of Jerusalem,--that the
Colosseum! Through one passed the triumph of the deified
invader; in one fell the butchered gladiators. Monuments of
murder, how poor the thoughts, how mean the memories ye awaken,
compared with those that speak to the heart of man on the heights
of Phyle, or by thy lone mound, grey Marathon! We stand amidst
weeds and brambles and long waving herbage. Where we stand
reigned Nero,--here were his tessellated floors; here,
"Mighty in the heaven, a second heaven,"
hung the vault of his ivory roofs; here, arch upon arch, pillar
on pillar, glittered to the world the golden palace of its
master,--the Golden House of Nero. How the lizard watches us
with his bright, timorous eye! We disturb his reign. Gather
that wild flower: the Golden House is vanished, but the wild
flower may have kin to those which the stranger's hand scattered
over the tyrant's grave; see, over this soil, the grave of Rome,
Nature strews the wild flowers still!
In the midst of this desolation is an old building of the middle
ages. Here dwells a singular recluse. In the season of the
malaria the native peasant flies the rank vegetation round; but
he, a stranger and a foreigner, no associates, no companions,
except books and instruments of science. He is often seen
wandering over the grass-grown hills, or sauntering through the
streets of the new city, not with the absent brow and incurious
air of students, but with observant piercing eyes that seem to
dive into the hearts of the passers-by. An old man, but not
infirm,--erect and stately, as if in his prime. None know
whether he be rich or poor. He asks no charity, and he gives
none,--he does no evil, and seems to confer no good. He is a man
who appears to have no world beyond himself; but appearances are
deceitful, and Science, as well as Benevolence, lives in the
Universe. This abode, for the first time since thus occupied, a
visitor enters. It is Zanoni.
You observe those two men seated together, conversing earnestly.
Years long and many have flown away since they met last,--at
least, bodily, and face to face. But if they are sages, thought
can meet thought, and spirit spirit, though oceans divide the
forms. Death itself divides not the wise. Thou meetest Plato
when thine eyes moisten over the Phaedo. May Homer live with all
men forever!
They converse; they confess to each other; they conjure up the
past, and repeople it; but note how differently do such
remembrances affect the two. On Zanoni's face, despite its
habitual calm, the emotions change and go. HE has acted in the
past he surveys; but not a trace of the humanity that
participates in joy and sorrow can be detected on the passionless
visage of his companion; the past, to him, as is now the present,
has been but as Nature to the sage, the volume to the student,--a
calm and spiritual life, a study, a contemplation.
From the past they turn to the future. Ah! at the close of the
last century, the future seemed a thing tangible,--it was woven
up in all men's fears and hopes of the present.
At the verge of that hundred years, Man, the ripest born of Time,
("An des Jahrhunderts Neige,
Der reifste Sohn der Zeit."
"Die Kunstler.")
stood as at the deathbed of the Old World, and beheld the New
Orb, blood-red amidst cloud and vapour,--uncertain if a comet or
a sun. Behold the icy and profound disdain on the brow of the
old man,--the lofty yet touching sadness that darkens the
glorious countenance of Zanoni. Is it that one views with
contempt the struggle and its issue, and the other with awe or
pity? Wisdom contemplating mankind leads but to the two
results,--compassion or disdain. He who believes in other worlds
can accustom himself to look on this as the naturalist on the
revolutions of an ant-hill, or of a leaf. What is the Earth to
Infinity,--what its duration to the Eternal? Oh, how much
greater is the soul of one man than the vicissitudes of the whole
globe! Child of heaven, and heir of immortality, how from some
star hereafter wilt thou look back on the ant-hill and its
commotions, from Clovis to Robespierre, from Noah to the Final
Fire. The spirit that can contemplate, that lives only in the
intellect, can ascend to its star, even from the midst of the
burial-ground called Earth, and while the sarcophagus called Life
immures in its clay the everlasting!
But thou, Zanoni,--thou hast refused to live ONLY in the
intellect; thou hast not mortified the heart; thy pulse still
beats with the sweet music of mortal passion; thy kind is to thee
still something warmer than an abstraction,--thou wouldst look
upon this Revolution in its cradle, which the storms rock; thou
wouldst see the world while its elements yet struggle through the
chaos!
Go!
