Though mixed up with what was rude and earthlike,
there was still a remote, dreamlike, Arcadian charm,
which is scarcely to be found in the daily toil of other
lands. Among the pleasant features of the wayside were
always the vines, clambering on fig-trees, or other sturdy
trunks; they wreathed themselves, in huge and rich
festoons, from one tree to another, suspending clusters of
ripening grapes in the interval between. Under such
careless mode of culture, the luxuriant vine is a lovelier
spectacle than where it produces a more precious liquor,
and is therefore more artificially restrained and trimmed.
Nothing can be more picturesque than an old grape-vine,
with almost a trunk of its own, clinging fast around its
supporting tree. Nor does the picture lack its moral. You
might twist it to more than one grave purpose, as you
saw how the knotted, serpentine growth imprisoned within
its strong embrace the friend that had supported its tender
infancy; and how (as seemingly flexible natures are
prone to do) it converted the sturdier tree entirely to its
own selfish ends, extending its innumerable arms on every
bough, and permitting hardly a leaf to sprout except its
own. It occurred to Kenyon, that the enemies of the
vine, in his native land, might here have seen an emblem
of the remorseless gripe, which the habit of vinous enjoyment
lays upon its victim, possessing him wholly, and
letting him live no life but such as it bestows.

The scene was not less characteristic when their path
led the two wanderers through some small, ancient town.
There, besides the peculiarities of present life, they saw
tokens of the life that had long ago been lived and flung

[figure description] Page 082.[end figure description]

aside. The little town, such as we see in our mind's eye,
would have its gate and its surrounding walls, so ancient
and massive that ages had not sufficed to crumble them
away; but in the lofty upper portion of the gateway, still
standing over the empty arch, where there was no longer
a gate to shut, there would be a dove-cote, and peaceful
doves for the only warders. Pumpkins lay ripening in
the open chambers of the structure. Then, as for the
town-wall, on the outside an orchard extends peacefully
along its base, full, not of apple-trees, but of those old
humorists with gnarled trunks and twisted boughs, the
olives. Houses have been built upon the ramparts, or
burrowed out of their ponderous foundation. Even the
gray, martial towers crowned with ruined turrets, have
been converted into rustic habitations, from the windows
of which hang ears of Indian corn. At a door, that has
been broken through the massive stonework, where it
was meant to be strongest, some contadini are winnowing
grain. Small windows, too, are pierced through the
whole line of ancient wall, so that it seems a row of dwellings
with one continuous front, built in a strange style
of needless strength; but remnants of the old battlements
and machicolations are interspersed with the homely
chambers and earthen-tiled house-tops; and all along its
extent both grape-vines and running flower-shrubs are
encouraged to clamber and sport over the roughnesses of
its decay.

Finally the long grass intermixed with weeds and wild
flowers, waves on the uppermost height of the shattered
rampart; and it is exceedingly pleasant in the golden

[figure description] Page 083.[end figure description]

sunshine of the afternoon to behold the warlike precinct
so friendly in its old days, and so overgrown with rural
peace. In its guard-rooms, its prison-chambers, and
scooped out of its ponderous breadth, there are dwellings
now-a-days where happy human lives are spent. Human
parents and broods of children nestle in them, even as
the swallows nestle in the little crevices along the broken
summit of the wall.

Passing through the gateway of this same little town,
challenged only by those watchful sentinels, the pigeons,
we find ourselves in a long, narrow street, paved from side
to side with flagstones, in the old Roman fashion. Nothing
can exceed the grim ugliness of the houses, most of
which are three or four stories high, stone built, gray, dilapidated,
or half-covered with plaster in patches, and
contiguous all along from end to end of the town. Nature,
in the shape of tree, shrub, or grassy side-walk, is as
much shut out from the one street of the rustic village as
from the heart of any swarming city. The dark and half-ruinous
habitations, with their small windows, many of
which are drearily closed with wooden shutters, are but
magnified hovels, piled story upon story, and squalid with
the grime that successive ages have left behind them. It
would be a hideous scene to contemplate in a rainy day,
or when no human life pervaded it. In the summer-noon,
however, it possesses vivacity enough to keep itself cheerful;
for all the within-doors of the village then bubbles
over upon the flagstones, or looks out from the small windows,
and from here and there a balcony. Some of the
populace are at the butcher's shop; others are at the

[figure description] Page 084.[end figure description]

fountain, which gushes into a marble basin that resembles an
antique sarcophagus. A tailor is sewing before his door,
with a young priest seated sociably beside him; a burly
friar goes by with an empty wine-barrel on his head;
children are at play; women at their own doorsteps mend
clothes, embroider, weave hats of Tuscan straw, or twirl
the distaff. Many idlers, meanwhile, strolling from one
group to another, let the warm day slide by in the sweet,
interminable task of doing nothing,

From all these people there comes a babblement that
seems quite disproportioned to the number of tongues that
make it. So many words are not uttered in a New England
village throughout the year — except it be at a
political canvass or town-meeting — as are spoken here,
with no especial purpose, in a single day. Neither so
many words, nor so much laughter; for people talk about
nothing as if they were terribly in earnest, and make
merry at nothing, as if it were the best of all possible
jokes. In so long a time as they have existed, and within
such narrow precincts, these little walled towns are brought
into a closeness of society that makes them but a larger
household. All the inhabitants are akin to each, and
each to all; they assemble in the street as their common
saloon, and thus live and die in a familiarity of intercourse,
such as never can be known where a village is open at
either end, and all roundabout, and has ample room within
itself.

Stuck up beside the door of one house, in this village
street, is a withered bough; and on a stone seat, just under
the shadow of the bough, sits a party of jolly drinkers,

[figure description] Page 085.[end figure description]

making proof of the new wine, or quaffing the old, as their
often-tried and comfortable friend. Kenyon draws bridle
here (for the bough, or bush, is a symbol of the wine-shop
at this day in Italy, as it was three hundred years ago in
England), and calls for a goblet of the deep, mild purple
juice, well diluted with water from the fountain. The
Sunshine of Monte Beni would be welcome now. Meanwhile,
Donatello has ridden onward, but alights where a
shrine, with a burning lamp before it, is built into the
wall of an inn-stable. He kneels, and crosses himself,
and mutters a brief prayer, without attracting notice from
the passers-by, many of whom are parenthetically devout,
in a similar fashion. By this time the sculptor has drunk
off his wine-and-water, and our two travellers resume
their way, emerging from the opposite gate of the village.

Before them, again, lies the broad valley, with a mist
so thinly scattered over it as to be perceptible only in the
distance, and most so in the nooks of the hills. Now that
we have called it mist, it seems a mistake not rather to
have called it sunshine; the glory of so much light being
mingled with so little gloom, in the airy material of that
vapor. Be it mist or sunshine, it adds a touch of ideal
beauty to the scene, almost persuading the spectator that
this valley and those hills are visionary, because their visible
atmosphere is so like the substance of a dream.

Immediately about them, however, there were abundant
tokens that the country was not really the paradise
it looked to be, at a casual glance. Neither the wretched
cottages nor the dreary farm-houses seemed to partake of
the prosperity, with which so kindly a climate, and so

[figure description] Page 086.[end figure description]

fertile a portion of Mother Earth's bosom, should have filled
them, one and all. But, possibly, the peasant inhabitants
do not exist in so grimy a poverty; and in homes so comfortless,
as a stranger, with his native ideas of those matters,
would be likely to imagine. The Italians appear to
possess none of that emulative pride which we see in our
New England villages, where every householder, according
to his taste and means, endeavors to make his homestead
an ornament to the grassy and elm-shadowed
wayside. In Italy there are no neat doorsteps and
thresholds; no pleasant, vine-sheltered porches; none
of those grass-plots or smoothly-shorn lawns, which hospitably
invite the imagination into the sweet domestic
interiors of English life. Everything, however sunny
and luxuriant may be the scene around, is especially
disheartening in the immediate neighborhood of an Italian
home.

An artist, it is true, might often thank his stars for
those old houses, so picturesquely time-stained, and with
the plaster falling in blotches from the ancient brickwork.
The prison-like, iron-barred windows, and the wide-arched,
dismal entrance, admitting on one hand to the
stable, on the other to the kitchen, might impress him
as far better worth his pencil than the newly-painted
pine boxes, in which — if he be an American — his
countrymen live and thrive. But there is reason to
suspect that a people are waning to decay and ruin the
moment that their life becomes fascinating either in the
poet's imagination or the painter's eye.

As usual, on Italian waysides, the wanderers passed

[figure description] Page 087.[end figure description]

great, black crosses, hung with all the instruments of the
sacred agony and passion; there were the crown of
thorns, the hammer and nails, the pinchers, the spear,
the sponge; and perched over the whole, the cock that
crowed to Saint Peter's remorseful conscience. Thus,
while the fertile scene showed the never-failing beneficence
of the Creator towards man in his transitory state,
these symbols reminded each wayfarer of the Saviour's
infinitely greater love for him as an immortal spirit. Beholding
these consecrated stations, the idea seemed to
strike Donatello of converting the otherwise aimless
journey into a penitential pilgrimage. At each of them
he alighted to kneel and kiss the cross, and humbly
press his forehead against its foot; and this so invariably,
that the sculptor soon learned to draw bridle of his
own accord. It may be, too, heretic as he was, that
Kenyon likewise put up a prayer, rendered more fervent
by the symbols before his eyes, for the peace of his
friend's conscience, and the pardon of the sin that so
oppressed him.

Not only at the crosses did Donatello kneel, but at each
of the many shrines, where the blessed Virgin in fresco—
faded with sunshine and half washed out with showers—
looked benignly at her worshipper; or where she
was represented in a wooden image, or a bas-relief of plaster
or marble, as accorded with the means of the devout
person who built, or restored from a mediæval antiquity,
these places of wayside worship. They were everywhere;
under arched niches, or in little penthouses with
a brick tiled roof, just large enough to shelter them; or

[figure description] Page 088.[end figure description]

perhaps in some bit of old Roman masonry, the founders
of which had died before the Advent; or in the wall of
a country inn or farm-house, or at the midway point of a
bridge, or in the shallow cavity of a natural rock, or high
upward in the deep cuts of the road. It appeared to the
sculptor that Donatello prayed the more earnestly and the
more hopefully at these shrines, because the mild face of
the Madonna promised him to intercede as a tender
mother betwixt the poor culprit and the awfulness of
judgment.

It was beautiful to observe, indeed, how tender was the
soul of man and woman towards the Virgin mother, in
recognition of the tenderness which, as their faith taught
them, she immortally cherishes towards all human souls.
In the wire-work screen, before each shrine, hung offerings
of roses, or whatever flower was sweetest and
most seasonable; some already wilted and withered, some
fresh with that very morning's dew-drops. Flowers there
were, too, that, being artificial, never bloomed on earth,
nor would ever fade. The thought occurred to Kenyon,
that flower-pots with living plants, might be set within the
niches, or even that rose-trees, and all kinds of flowering
shrubs, might be reared under the shrines and taught to
twine and wreath themselves around; so that the Virgin
should dwell within a bower of verdure, bloom, and fragrant
freshness, symbolizing a homage perpetually new.
There are many things in the religious customs of these
people that seem good; many things, at least, that might
be both good and beautiful, if the soul of goodness and
the sense of beauty were as much alive in the Italians

[figure description] Page 089.[end figure description]

now as they must have been when those customs were
first imagined and adopted. But, instead of blossoms on
the shrub, or freshly gathered, with the dew-drops on
their leaves, their worship, now-a-days, is best symbolized
by the artificial flower.

The sculptor fancied, moreover, (but perhaps it was his
heresy that suggested the idea,) that it would be of happy
influence to place a comfortable and shady seat beneath
every wayside shrine. Then, the weary and sun-scorched
traveller, while resting himself under her protecting shadow,
might thank the Virgin for her hospitality. Nor
perchance, were he to regale himself, even in such a consecrated
spot, with the fragrance of a pipe, would it rise
to heaven more offensively than the smoke of priestly incense.
We do ourselves wrong, and too meanly estimate
the Holiness above us, when we deem that any act or
enjoyment, good in itself, is not good to do religiously.

Whatever may be the iniquities of the papal system, it
was a wise and lovely sentiment, that set up the frequent
shrine and cross along the roadside. No wayfarer, bent
on whatever worldly errand, can fail to be reminded, at
every mile or two, that this is not the business which
most concerns him. The pleasure-seeker is silently admonished
to look heavenward for a joy infinitely greater
than he now possesses. The wretch in temptation beholds
the cross, and is warned, that if he yield, the Saviour's
agony for his sake will have been endured in vain. The
stubborn criminal, whose heart has long been like a stone,
feels it throb anew with dread and hope, and our poor
Donatello, as he went kneeling from shrine to cross, and

[figure description] Page 090.[end figure description]

from cross to shrine, doubtless found an efficacy in these
symbols that helped him towards a higher penitence.

Whether the young Count of Monte Beni noticed the
fact, or no, there was more than one incident of their
journey that led Kenyon to believe, that they were attended,
or closely followed, or preceded, near at hand, by
some one who took an interest in their motions. As it
were, the step, the sweeping garment, the faintly-heard
breath, of an invisible companion, was beside them, as
they went on their way. It was like a dream that had
strayed out of their slumber and was haunting them in
the daytime, when its shadowy substance could have
neither density nor outline, in the too obtrusive light.
After sunset, it grew a little more distinct.

“On the left of that last shrine,” asked the sculptor,
as they rode, under the moon, “did you observe the
figure of a woman kneeling, with her face hidden in her
hands?”

“I never looked that way,” replied Donatello. “I was
saying my own prayer. It was some penitent, perchance.
May the Blessed Virgin be the more gracious to the poor
soul, because she is a woman.”

p576-408 CHAPTER VIII. PICTURED WINDOWS.

[figure description] Page 091.[end figure description]

After wide wanderings through the valley, the two
travellers directed their course towards its boundary of
hills. Here, the natural scenery and men's modifications
of it immediately took a different aspect from that of the
fertile and smiling plain. Not unfrequently there was a
convent on the hill-side; or, on some insulated promontory,
a ruined castle, once the den of a robber chieftain,
who was accustomed to dash down from his commanding
height upon the road that wound below. For ages back,
the old fortress had been flinging down its crumbling ramparts,
stone by stone, towards the grimy village at its foot.

Their road wound onward among the hills, which rose
steep and lofty from the scanty level space that lay between
them. They continually thrust their great bulks
before the wayfarers, as if grimly resolute to forbid their
passage, or closed abruptly behind them, when they still
dared to proceed. A gigantic hill would set its foot right
down before them, and only at the last moment, would
grudgingly withdraw it, just far enough to let them creep
towards another obstacle. Adown these rough heights

[figure description] Page 092.[end figure description]

were visible the dry tracks of many a mountain-torrent
that had lived a life too fierce and passionate to be a long
one. Or, perhaps a stream was yet hurrying shyly along
the edge of a far wider bed of pebbles and shelving rock
than it seemed to need, though not too wide for the
swollen rage of which this shy rivulet was capable. A
stone bridge bestrode it, the ponderous arches of which
were upheld and rendered indestructible by the weight
of the very stones that threatened to crush them down.
Old Roman toil was perceptible in the foundations of that
massive bridge; the first weight that it ever bore was
that of an army of the Republic.

Threading these defiles, they would arrive at some immemorial
city, crowning the high summit of a hill with
its cathedral, its many churches, and public edifices, all
of Gothic architecture. With no more level ground
than a single piazza, in the midst, the ancient town tumbled
its crooked and narrow streets down the mountainside,
through arched passages and by steps of stone. The
aspect of everything was awfully old; older, indeed, in
its effect on the imagination, than Rome itself, because
history does not lay its finger on these forgotten edifices
and tell us all about their origin. Etrucean princes may
have dwelt in them. A thousand years, at all events,
would seem but a middle age for these structures. They
are built of such huge, square stones, that their appearance
of ponderous durability distresses the beholder with
the idea that they can never fall — never crumble away—
never be less fit than now for human habitation.
Many of them may once have been palaces, and still

[figure description] Page 093.[end figure description]

retain a squalid grandeur. But, gazing at them, we recognize
how undesirable it is to build the tabernacle of
our brief lifetime out of permanent materials, and with
a view to their being occupied by future generations.

All towns should be made capable of purification by
fire, or of decay within each half-century. Otherwise,
they become the hereditary haunts of vermin and noisomeness,
besides standing apart from the possibility of
such improvements as are constantly introduced into the
rest of man's contrivances and accommodations. It is
beautiful, no doubt, and exceedingly satisfactory to some
of our natural instincts, to imagine our far posterity
dwelling under the same roof-tree as ourselves. Still,
when people insist on building indestructible houses, they
incur, or their children do, a misfortune analogous to that
of the Sibyl, when she obtained the grievous boon of immortality.
So, we may build almost immortal habitations,
it is true; but we cannot keep them from growing old,
musty, unwholesome, dreary, full of death-scents, ghosts,
and murder-stains; in short, such habitations as one sees
everywhere in Italy, be they hovels or palaces.

“You should go with me to my native country,” observed
the sculptor, to Donatello. “In that fortunate
land, each generation has only its own sins and sorrows
to bear. Here, it seems as if all the weary and dreary
Past were piled upon the back of the Present. If I were
to lose my spirits in this country — if I were to suffer
any heavy misfortune here — methinks it would be impossible
to stand up against it, under such adverse
influences.”

[figure description] Page 094.[end figure description]

“The sky itself is an old roof, now,” answered the
Count; “and, no doubt, the sins of mankind have made
it gloomier than it used to be.”

“Oh, my poor Faun,” thought Kenyon to himself,
“how art thou changed!”

A city, like this of which we speak, seems a sort of
stony growth out of the hill-side, or a fossilized town; so
ancient and strange it looks, without enough of life and
juiciness in it to be any longer susceptible of decay.
An earthquake would afford it the only chance of being
ruined, beyond its present ruin.

Yet, though dead to all the purposes for which we live
to-day, the place has its glorious recollections, and not
merely rude and warlike ones, but those of brighter and
milder triumphs, the fruits of which we still enjoy. Italy
can count several of these lifeless towns which, four or
five hundred years ago, were each the birthplace of its
own school of art; nor have they yet forgotten to be
proud of the dark, old pictures, and the faded frescoes,
the pristine beauty of which was a light and gladness to
the world. But now, unless one happens to be a painter,
these famous works make us miserably desperate. They
are poor, dim ghosts of what, when Giotto or Cimabue
first created them, threw a splendor along the stately
aisles; so far gone towards nothingness, in our day, that
scarcely a hint of design or expression can glimmer
through the dusk. Those early artists did well to paint
their frescoes. Glowing on the church walls, they might
be looked upon as symbols of the living spirit that made
Catholicism a true religion, and that glorified it as long as

[figure description] Page 095.[end figure description]

it retained a genuine life; they filled the transepts with a
radiant throng of saints and angels, and threw around the
high altar a faint reflection — as much as mortals could
see, or bear — of a Diviner Presence. But now that the
colors are so wretchedly bedimmed — now that blotches
of plastered wall dot the frescoes all over, like a mean
reality thrusting itself through life's brightest illusions, —
the next best artist to Cimabue or Giotto or Ghirlandaio
or Pinturicchio, will be he that shall reverently cover
their ruined masterpieces with whitewash!

Kenyon, however, being an earnest student and critic
of Art, lingered long before these pathetic relics; and
Donatello, in his present phase of penitence, thought no
time spent amiss while he could be kneeling before an
altar. Whenever they found a cathedral, therefore, or a
Gothic church, the two travellers were of one mind to
enter it. In some of these holy edifices they saw pictures
that time had not dimmed nor injured in the least, though
they perhaps belonged to as old a school of Art as any
that were perishing around them. These were the painted
windows; and as often as he gazed at them the sculptor
blessed the mediæval time, and its gorgeous contrivances
of splendor; for surely the skill of man has never accomplished,
nor his mind imagined, any other beauty or glory
worthy to be compared with these.

It is the special excellence of pictured glass, that the
light, which falls merely on the outside of other pictures,
is here interfused throughout the work; it illuminates the
design, and invests it with a living radiance; and in requital
the unfading colors transmute the common daylight

[figure description] Page 096.[end figure description]

into a miracle of richness and glory in its passage through
the heavenly substance of the blessed and angelic shapes
which throng the high-arched window.

“It is a woful thing,” cried Kenyon, while one of
these frail, yet enduring and fadeless pictures threw its
hues on his face, and on the pavement of the church
around him, — “a sad necessity that any Christian soul
should pass from earth without once seeing an antique
painted window, with the bright Italian sunshine glowing
through it! There is no other such true symbol of the
glories of the better world, where a celestial radiance will
be inherent in all things and persons, and render each
continually transparent to the sight of all.”

“But what a horror it would be,” said Donatello, sadly,
“if there were a soul among them through which the light
could not be transfused.”

“Yes; and perhaps this is to be the punishment of sin,”
replied the sculptor; “not that it shall be made evident
to the universe, which can profit nothing by such knowledge,
but that it shall insulate the sinner from all sweet
society by rendering him impermeable to light, and, therefore,
unrecognizable in the abode of heavenly simplicity
and truth. Then, what remains for him, but the dreariness
of infinite and eternal solitude.”

“That would be a horrible destiny, indeed!” said Donatello.

His voice as he spoke the words had a hollow and
dreary cadence, as if he anticipated some such frozen
solitude for himself. A figure in a dark robe was lurking
in the obscurity of a side-chapel close by, and made an

[figure description] Page 097.[end figure description]

impulsive movement forward, but hesitated as Donatello
spoke again.

“But there might be a more miserable torture than to
be solitary forever,” said he. “Think of having a single
companion in eternity, and instead of finding any
consolation, or at all events variety of torture, to see
your own weary, weary sin repeated in that inseparable
soul.”

“I think, my dear Count, you have never read Dante,”
observed Kenyon. “That idea is somewhat in his style,
but I cannot help regretting that it came into your mind
just then.”

The dark-robed figure had shrunk back, and was quite
lost to sight among the shadows of the chapel.

“There was an English poet,” resumed Kenyon, turning
again towards the window; “who speaks of the
`dim, religious light,' transmitted through painted glass.
I always admired this richly descriptive phrase; but,
though he was once in Italy, I question whether Milton
ever saw any but the dingy pictures in the dusty windows
of English cathedrals, imperfectly shown by the gray
English daylight. He would else have illuminated that
word, `dim,' with some epithet that should not chase
away the dimness, yet should make it glow like a million
of rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and topazes. Is it not so
with yonder window? The pictures are most brilliant in
themselves, yet dim with tenderness and reverence, because
God himself is shining through them.”

“The pictures fill me with emotion, but not such as
you seem to experience,” said Donatello. “I tremble at

[figure description] Page 098.[end figure description]

those awful saints; and, most of all, at the figure above
them. He glows with Divine wrath!”

“My dear friend,” exclaimed Kenyon, “how strangely
your eyes have transmuted the expression of the figure!
It is divine love, not wrath.”

“To my eyes,” said Donatello, stubbornly, “it is wrath,
not love! Each must interpret for himself.”

The friends left the church, and, looking up from the
exterior, at the window which they had just been contemplating
within, nothing was visible but the merest outline
of dusky shapes. Neither the individual likeness of
saint, angel, nor Saviour, and far less the combined
scheme and purport of the picture, could anywise be
made out. That miracle of radiant art, thus viewed, was
nothing better than an incomprehensible obscurity, without
a gleam of beauty to induce the beholder to attempt
unravelling it.

“All this,” thought the sculptor, “is a most forcible
emblem of the different aspect of religious truth and
sacred story, as viewed from the warm interior of belief,
or from its cold and dreary outside. Christian faith is a
grand cathedral, with divinely pictured windows. Standing
without, you see no glory, nor can possibly imagine
any; standing within, every ray of light reveals a harmony
of unspeakable splendors.”

After Kenyon and Donatello emerged from the church,
however, they had better opportunity for acts of charity
and mercy than for religious contemplation; being immediately
surrounded by a swarm of beggars, who are the
present possessors of Italy, and share the spoil of the

[figure description] Page 099.[end figure description]

stranger with the fleas and mosquitos, their formidable
allies. These pests — the human ones — had hunted the
two travellers at every stage of their journey. From
village to village, ragged boys and girls kept almost under
the horses' feet; hoary grandsires and grandames
caught glimpses of their approach, and hobbled to intercept
them at some point of vantage; blind men stared
them out of countenance with their sightless orbs; women
held up their unwashed babies; cripples displayed their
wooden legs, their grievous scars, their dangling, boneless,
arms, their broken backs, their burden of a hump, or
whatever infirmity or deformity Providence had assigned
them for an inheritance. On the highest mountain summit—
in the most shadowy ravine — there was a beggar
waiting for them. In one small village, Kenyon had the
curiosity to count merely how many children were crying,
whining, and bellowing all at once for alms. They proved
to be more than forty of as ragged and dirtly little imps
as any in the world; besides whom, all the wrinkled matrons,
and most of the village maids, and not a few stalwart
men, held out their hands grimly, piteously, or
smilingly, in the forlorn hope of whatever trifle of coin
might remain in pockets already so fearfully taxed. Had
they been permitted, they would gladly have knelt down
and worshipped the travellers, and have cursed them,
without rising from their knees, if the expected boon
failed to be awarded.

Yet they were not so miserably poor but that the
grown people kept houses over their heads. In the way
of food, they had, at least, vegetables in their little

[figure description] Page 100.[end figure description]

gardens, pigs and chickens to kill, eggs to fry into omelets
with oil, wine to drink, and many other things to make
life comfortable. As for the children, when no more
small coin appeared to be forthcoming, they began to
laugh and play, and turn heels over head, showing themselves
jolly and vivacious brats, and evidently as well fed
as needs be. The truth is, the Italian peasantry look
upon strangers as the almoners of Providence, and therefore
feel no more shame in asking and receiving alms,
than in availing themselves of providential bounties in
whatever other form.

In accordance with his nature, Donatello was always
exceedingly charitable to these ragged battalions, and
appeared to derive a certain consolation from the prayers
which many of them put up in his behalf. In Italy a
copper coin of minute value will often make all the difference
between a vindictive curse — death by apoplexy being
the favorite one — mumbled in an old witch's toothless
jaws, and a prayer from the same lips, so earnest that
it would seem to reward the charitable soul with at least
a puff of grateful breath to help him heavenward. Good
wishes being so cheap, though possibly not very efficacious,
and anathemas so exceedingly bitter, — even if
the greater portion of their poison remain in the mouth
that utters them, — it may be wise to expend some reasonable
amount in the purchase of the former. Donatello
invariably did so; and as he distributed his
alms under the pictured window, of which we have been
speaking, no less than seven ancient women lifted their
hands and besought blessings on his head.

[figure description] Page 101.[end figure description]

“Come,” said the sculptor, rejoicing at the happier
expression which he saw in his friend's face, “I think
your steed will not stumble with you to-day. Each of
these old dames looks as much like Horace's Atra Cura
as can well be conceived; but, though there are seven
of them, they will make your burden on horseback
lighter instead of heavier.”

“Are we to ride far?” asked the Count.

“A tolerable journey betwixt now and to-morrow noon,”
Kenyon replied; “for, at that hour, I purpose to be standing
by the Pope's statue in the great square of Perugia.”

p576-419 CHAPTER IX. MARKET-DAY IN PERUGIA.

[figure description] Page 102.[end figure description]

Perugia, on its lofty hill-top, was reached by the two
travellers before the sun had quite kissed away the early
freshness of the morning. Since midnight, there had
been a heavy rain, bringing infinite refreshment to the
scene of verdure and fertility amid which this ancient
civilization stands; insomuch that Kenyon loitered, when
they came to the gray city-wall, and was loth to give up
the prospect of the sunny wilderness that lay below. It
was as green as England, and bright as Italy alone.
There was the wide valley, sweeping down and spreading
away on all sides from the weed-grown ramparts,
and bounded afar by mountains, which lay asleep in the
sun, with thin mists and silvery clouds floating about
their heads by way of morning dreams.

“It lacks still two hours of noon,” said the sculptor to
his friend, as they stood under the arch of the gateway,
waiting for their passports to be examined; “will you
come with me to see some admirable frescoes by Perugino?
There is a hall in the Exchange, of no great
magnitude, but covered with what must have been — at

[figure description] Page 103.[end figure description]

the time it was painted — such magnificence and beauty
as the world had not elsewhere to show.”

“It depresses me to look at old frescoes,” responded
the Count; “it is a pain, yet not enough of a pain to
answer as a penance.”

“Will you look at some pictures by Fra Angelico in
the Church of San Domenico?” asked Kenyon; “they
are full of religious sincerity. When one studies them
faithfully, it is like holding a conversation about heavenly
things with a tender and devout-minded man.”

“You have shown me some of Fra Angelico's pictures,
I remember,” answered Donatello; “his angels look as if
they had never taken a flight out of heaven; and his
saints seem to have been born saints, and always to have
lived so. Young maidens, and all innocent persons, I
doubt not, may find great delight and profit in looking at
such holy pictures. But they are not for me.”

“Your criticism, I fancy, has great moral depth,” replied
Kenyon; “and I see in it the reason why Hilda so
highly appreciates Fra Angelico's pictures. Well; we
will let all such matters pass for to-day, and stroll about
this fine old city till noon.”

They wandered to and fro, accordingly, and lost themselves
among the strange, precipitate passages, which, in
Perugia, are called streets. Some of them are like caverns,
being arched all over, and plunging down abruptly
towards an unknown darkness; which, when you have
fathomed its depths, admits you to a daylight that you
scarcely hoped to behold again. Here they met shabby
men, and the careworn wives and mothers of the people,

[figure description] Page 104.[end figure description]

some of whom guided children in leading-strings through
those dim and antique thoroughfares, where a hundred
generations had passed before the little feet of to-day
began to tread them. Thence they climbed upward
again, and came to the level plateau, on the summit of
the hill, where are situated the grand piazza and the principal
public edifices.

It happened to be market-day in Perugia. The great
square, therefore, presented a far more vivacious spectacle
than would have been witnessed in it at any other
time of the week, though not so lively as to overcome the
gray solemnity of the architectural portion of the scene.
In the shadow of the cathedral and other old Gothic
structures — seeking shelter from the sunshine that fell
across the rest of the piazza — was a crowd of people,
engaged as buyers or sellers in the petty traffic of a
country-fair. Dealers had erected booths and stalls on
the pavement, and overspread them with scanty awnings,
beneath which they stood, vociferously crying their merchandise;
such as shoes, hats and caps, yarn stockings,
cheap jewelry and cutlery, books, chiefly little volumes
of a religious character, and a few French novels; toys,
tin-ware, old iron, cloth, rosaries of beads, crucifixes, cakes,
biscuits, sugar-plums, and innumerable little odds and
ends, which we see no object in advertising. Baskets of
grapes, figs, and pears, stood on the ground. Donkeys,
bearing panniers stuffed out with kitchen vegetables, and
requiring an ample road-way, roughly shouldered aside
the throng.

Crowded as the square was, a juggler found room to

[figure description] Page 105.[end figure description]

spread out a white cloth upon the pavement, and cover it
with cups, plates, balls, cards, — the whole material of his
magic, in short, — wherewith he proceeded to work miracles
under the noonday sun. An organ-grinder at one
point, and a clarion and a flute at another, accomplished
what they could towards filling the wide space with tuneful
noise. Their small uproar, however, was nearly
drowned by the multitudinous voices of the people, bargaining,
quarrelling, laughing, and babbling copiously at
random; for the briskness of the mountain atmosphere, or
some other cause, made everybody so loquacious that more
words were wasted in Perugia on this one market-day,
than the noisiest piazza of Rome would utter in a month.

Through all this petty tumult, which kept beguiling
one's eyes and upper strata of thought, it was delightful
to catch glimpses of the grand old architecture that stood
around the square. The life of the flitting moment, existing
in the antique shell of an age gone by, has a fascination
which we do not find in either the past or present,
taken by themselves. It might seem irreverent to make
the gray cathedral and the tall, time-worn palaces echo
back the exuberant vociferation of the market; but they
did so, and caused the sound to assume a kind of poetic
rhythm, and themselves looked only the more majestic
for their condescension.

On one side, there was an immense edifice devoted
to public purposes, with an antique gallery, and a range
of arched and stone-mullioned windows, running along its
front; and by way of entrance it had a central Gothic
arch, elaborately wreathed around with sculptured

[figure description] Page 106.[end figure description]

semicircles, within which the spectator was aware of a stately
and impressive gloom. Though merely the municipal
council house and exchange of a decayed country town,
this structure was worthy to have held in one portion
of it the parliament-hall of a nation, and in the other,
the state apartments of its ruler. On another side of the
square rose the mediæval front of the cathedral, where
the imagination of a Gothic architect had long ago flowered
out indestructibly, achieving, in the first place, a
grand design, and then covering it with such abundant
detail of ornament, that the magnitude of the work
seemed less a miracle than its minuteness. You would
suppose that he must have softened the stone into wax,
until his most delicate fancies were modelled in the pliant
material, and then had hardened it into stone again.
The whole was a vast, black-letter page of the richest and
quaintest poetry. In fit keeping with all this old magnificence,
was a great marble fountain, where again the
Gothic imagination showed its overflow and gratuity of
device in the manifold sculptures which it lavished as
freely as the water did its shifting shapes.

Besides the two venerable structures which we have
described there were lofty palaces, perhaps of as old a
date, rising story above story, and adorned with balconies,
whence, hundreds of years ago, the princely occupants
had been accustomed to gaze down at the sports, business,
and popular assemblages of the piazza. And, beyond all
question, they thus witnessed the erection of a bronze
statue, which, three centuries since, was placed on the
pedestal that it still occupies.

[figure description] Page 107.[end figure description]

“I never come to Perugia,” said Kenyon, “without
spending as much time as I can spare in studying yonder
statue of Pope Julius the Third. Those sculptors of the
middle age have fitter lessons for the professors of my
art than we can find in the Grecian masterpieces. They
belong to our Christian civilization; and, being earnest
works, they always express something which we do not
get from the antique. Will you look at it?

“Willingly,” replied the Count, “for I see, even so far
off, that the statue is bestowing a benediction, and there is
a feeling in my heart that I may be permitted to share
it.”

Remembering the similar idea which Miriam a short
time before had expressed, the sculptor smiled hopefully
at the coincidence. They made their way through the
throng of the market-place, and approached close to the
iron railing that protected the pedestal of the statue.

It was the figure of a pope, arrayed in his pontifical
robes, and crowned with the tiara. He sat in a bronze
chair, elevated high above the pavement, and seemed to
take kindly yet authoritative cognizance of the busy scene
which was at that moment passing before his eyes. His
right hand was raised and spread abroad, as if in the act
of shedding forth a benediction, which every man — so
broad, so wise, and so serenely affectionate was the bronze
pope's regard — might hope to feel quietly descending
upon the need, or the distress, that he had closest at his
heart. The statue had life and observation in it, as well
as patriarchal majesty. An imaginative spectator could
not but be impressed with the idea that this benignly

[figure description] Page 108.[end figure description]

awful representative of divine and human authority might
rise from his brazen chair, should any great public exigency
demand his interposition, and encourage or restrain
the people by his gesture, or even by prophetic utterances
worthy of so grand a presence.

And, in the long, calm intervals, amid the quiet lapse
of ages, the pontiff watched the daily turmoil around his
seat, listening with majestic patience to the market cries,
and all the petty uproar that awoke the echoes of the
stately old piazza. He was the enduring friend of these
men, and of their forefathers and children, — the familiar
face of generations.

“The pope's blessing, methinks, has fallen upon you,”
observed the sculptor, looking at his friend.

In truth, Donatello's countenance indicated a healthier
spirit than while he was brooding in his melancholy tower.
The change of scene, the breaking up of custom, the fresh
flow of incidents, the sense of being homeless, and therefore
free, had done something for our poor Faun; these
circumstances had at least promoted a reaction, which
might else have been slower in its progress. Then, no
doubt, the bright day, the gay spectacle of the market-place,
and the sympathetic exhilaration of so many people's
cheerfulness, had each their suitable effect on a temper naturally
prone to be glad. Perhaps, too, he was magnetically
conscious of a presence that formerly sufficed to
make him happy. Be the cause what it might, Donatello's
eyes shone with a serene and hopeful expression,
while looking upward at the bronze pope, to whose widely
diffused blessing, it may be, he attributed all this good
influence.

[figure description] Page 109.[end figure description]

“Yes, my dear friend,” said he, in reply to the sculptor's
remark, “I feel the blessing upon my spirit.”

“It is wonderful,” said Kenyon, with a smile, “wonderful
and delightful to think how long a good man's
beneficence may be potent, even after his death. How
great, then, must have been the efficacy of this excellent
pontiff's blessing while he was alive!”

“I have heard,” remarked the Count, “that there was
a brazen image set up in the Wilderness, the sight of
which healed the Israelites of their poisonous and rankling
wounds. If it be the blessed Virgin's pleasure, why
should not this holy image before us do me equal good?
A wound has long been rankling in my soul, and filling it
with poison.”

“I did wrong to smile,” answered Kenyon. “It is
not for me to limit Providence in its operations on man's
spirit.”

While they stood talking, the clock of the neighboring
cathedral told the hour, with twelve reverberating strokes,
which it flung down upon the crowded market-place, as if
warning one and all to take advantage of the bronze pontiff's
benediction, or of Heaven's blessing, however proffered,
before the opportunity were lost.

“High noon,” said the sculptor. “It is Miriam's
hour!”

p576-427 CHAPTER X. THE BRONZE PONTIFE'S BENEDICTION.

[figure description] Page 110.[end figure description]

When the last of the twelve strokes had fallen from
the cathedral clock, Kenyon threw his eyes over the
busy scene of the market-place, expecting to discern
Miriam somewhere in the crowd. He looked next towards
the cathedral itself, where it was reasonable to imagine
that she might have taken shelter, while awaiting
her appointed time. Seeing no trace of her in either
direction, his eyes came back from their quest somewhat
disappointed, and rested on a figure which was leaning,
like Donatello and himself, on the iron balustrade that
surrounded the statue. Only a moment before, they two
had been alone.

It was the figure of a woman, with her head bowed on
her hands, as if she deeply felt — what we have been
endeavoring to convey into our feeble description — the
benign and awe-inspiring influence which the pontiff's
statue exercises upon a sensitive spectator. No matter
though it were modelled for a Catholic chief priest, the
desolate heart, whatever be its religion, recognizes in that
image the likeness of a father.

[figure description] Page 111.[end figure description]

Miriam,” said the sculptor, with a tremor in his voice,
“is it yourself?”

“It is I,” she replied; “I am faithful to my engagement,
though with many fears.”

She lifted her head, and revealed to Kenyon — revealed
to Donatello likewise — the well-remembered features of
Miriam. They were pale and worn, but distinguished
even now, though less gorgeously, by a beauty that might
be imagined bright enough to glimmer with its own light
in a dim cathedral aisle, and had no need to shrink from
the severer test of the mid-day sun. But she seemed
tremulous, and hardly able to go through with a scene
which at a distance she had found courage to undertake.

“You are most welcome, Miriam!” said the sculptor,
seeking to afford her the encouragement which he saw
she so greatly required. “I have a hopeful trust that the
result of this interview will be propitious. Come; let
me lead you to Donatello.”

“No, Kenyon, no!” whispered Miriam, shrinking back;
“unless of his own accord he speaks my name — unless
he bids me stay — no word shall ever pass between him
and me. It is not that I take upon me to be proud at this
late hour. Among other feminine qualities, I threw away
my pride when Hilda cast me off.”

“If not pride, what else restrains you?” Kenyon asked,
a little angry at her unseasonable scruples, and also
at this half-complaining reference to Hilda's just severity.
“After daring so much, it is no time for fear! If we let
him part from you without a word, your opportunity of
doing him inestimable good is lost forever.”

[figure description] Page 112.[end figure description]

“True; it will be lost forever!” repeated Miriam,
sadly. “But, dear friend, will it be my fault? I willingly
fling my woman's pride at his feet. But — do you
not see? — his heart must be left freely to its own decision
whether to recognize me, because on his voluntary
choice depends the whole question whether my devotion
will do him good or harm. Except he feel an infinite
need of me, I am a burden and fatal obstruction to him!”

“Take your own course, then, Miriam,” said Kenyon;
“and doubtless, the crisis being what it is, your spirit is
better instructed for its emergencies than mine.”

While the foregoing words passed between them they
had withdrawn a little from the immediate vicinity of the
statue, so as to be out of Donatello's hearing. Still, however,
they were beneath the pontiff's outstretched hand;
and Miriam, with her beauty and her sorrow, looked up
into his benignant face, as if she had come thither for
his pardon and paternal affection, and despaired of so vast
a boon.

Meanwhile, she had not stood thus long in the public
square of Perugia, without attracting the observation of
many eyes. With their quick sense of beauty, these Italians
had recognized her loveliness, and spared not to take
their fill of gazing at it; though their native gentleness
and courtesy made their homage far less obtrusive than
that of Germans, French, or Anglo-Saxons might have
been. It is not improbable that Miriam had planned this
momentous interview, on so public a spot and at high
noon, with an eye to the sort of protection that would be
thrown over it by a multitude of eye-witnesses. In

[figure description] Page 113.[end figure description]

circumstances of profound feeling and passion, there is often
a sense that too great a seclusion cannot be endured;
there is an indefinite dread of being quite alone with the
object of our deepest interest. The species of solitude
that a crowd harbors within itself, is felt to be preferable,
in certain conditions of the heart, to the remoteness of a
desert or the depths of an untrodden wood. Hatred, love,
or whatever kind of too intense emotion, or even indifference,
where emotion has once been, instinctively seeks to
interpose some barrier between itself and the corresponding
passion in another breast. This, we suspect, was what
Miriam had thought of, in coming to the thronged piazza;
partly this, and partly, as she said, her superstition that
the benign statue held good influences in store.

But Donatello remained leaning against the balustrade.
She dared not glance towards him, to see whether he were
pale and agitated, or calm as ice. Only, she knew that
the moments were fleetly lapsing away, and that his heart
must call her soon, or the voice would never reach her.
She turned quite away from him and spoke again to the
sculptor.

“I have wished to meet you,” said she, “for more than
one reason. News have come to me respecting a dear
friend of ours. Nay, not of mine! I dare not call her a
friend of mine, though once the dearest.”

“Do you speak of Hilda?” exclaimed Kenyon, with
quick alarm. “Has anything befallen her? When I
last heard of her, she was still in Rome, and well.”

“Hilda remains in Rome,” replied Miriam, “nor is
she ill as regards physical health, though much depressed

[figure description] Page 114.[end figure description]

in spirits. She lives quite alone in her dove-cote; not a
friend near her, not one in Rome, which, you know, is
deserted by all but its native inhabitants. I fear for her
health, if she continue long in such solitude, with despondency
preying on her mind. I tell you this, knowing
the interest which the rare beauty of her character has
awakened in you.”

“I will go to Rome!” said the sculptor, in great emotion.
“Hilda has never allowed me to manifest more
than a friendly regard; but, at least, she cannot prevent
my watching over her at a humble distance. I will set
out this very hour.”

“Do not leave us now!” whispered Miriam, imploringly,
and laying her hand on his arm. “One moment
more! Ah; he has no word for me!”

“Miriam!” said Donatello.

Though but a single word, and the first that he had
spoken, its tone was a warrant of the sad and tender depth
from which it came. It told Miriam things of infinite importance,
and, first of all, that he still loved her. The
sense of their mutual crime had stunned, but not destroyed
the vitality of his affection; it was therefore indestructible.
That tone, too, bespoke an altered and deepened
character; it told of a vivified intellect, and of spiritual
instruction that had come through sorrow and remorse; so
that instead of the wild boy, the thing of sportive, animal
nature, the sylvan Faun — here was now the man of feeling
and intelligence.

She turned towards him, while his voice still reverberated
in the depths of her soul.

[figure description] Page 115.[end figure description]

“You have called me!” said she.

“Because my deepest heart has need of you!” he replied.
“Forgive, Miriam, the coldness, the hardness
with which I parted from you! I was bewildered with
strange horror and gloom.”

“Alas! and it was I that brought it on you,” said she.
“What repentance, what self-sacrifice, can atone for that
infinite wrong? There was something so sacred in the
innocent and joyous life which you were leading! A
happy person is such an unaccustomed and holy creature,
in this sad world! And, encountering so rare a being,
and gifted with the power of sympathy with his sunny
life, it was my doom, mine, to bring him within the limits
of sinful, sorrowful mortality! Bid me depart, Donatello!
Fling me off! No good, through my agency, can
follow upon such a mighty evil!”

“Miriam,” said he, “our lot lies together. Is it not
so? Tell me, in Heaven's name, if it be otherwise?”

Donatello's conscience was evidently perplexed with
doubt, whether the communion of a crime, such as they
two were jointly stained with, ought not to stifle all the
instinctive motions of their hearts, impelling them one
towards the other. Miriam, on the other hand, remorsefully
questioned with herself, whether the misery, already
accruing from her influence, should not warn her to withdraw
from his path. In this momentous interview therefore,
two souls were groping for each other in the darkness
of guilt and sorrow, and hardly were bold enough to grasp
the cold hands that they found.

The sculptor stood watching the scene with earnest
sympathy.

[figure description] Page 116.[end figure description]

“It seems irreverent,” said he, at length; “intrusive,
if not irreverent, for a third person to thrust himself
between the two solely concerned in a crisis like the
present. Yet, possibly as a bystander, though a deeply
interested one, I may discern somewhat of truth that is
hidden from you both; nay, at least interpret or suggest
some ideas which you might not so readily convey to
each other.”

“Speak!” said Miriam; “we confide in you.”

“Speak!” said Donatello. “You are true and upright.”

“I well know,” rejoined Kenyon, “that I shall not succeed
in uttering the few, deep words which, in this matter,
as in all others, include the absolute truth. But, here,
Miriam, is one whom a terrible misfortune has begun to
educate; it has taken him, and through your agency, out
of a wild and happy state, which, within circumscribed
limits, gave him joys that he cannot elsewhere find on
earth. On his behalf, you have incurred a responsibility
which you cannot fling aside. And here, Donatello, is one
whom Providence marks out as intimately connected with
your destiny. The mysterious process, by which our
earthly life instructs us for another state of being, was
begun for you by her. She has rich gifts of heart and
mind, a suggestive power, a magnetic influence, a sympathetic
knowledge, which, wisely and religiously exercised,
are what your condition needs. She possesses what you
require, and, with utter self-devotion, will use it for your
good. The bond betwixt you, therefore, is a true one,
and never — except by Heaven's own act — should be
rent asunder.”

[figure description] Page 117.[end figure description]

“Ah; he has spoken the truth!” cried Donatello,
grasping Miriam's hand.

“The very truth, dear friend,” cried Miriam.

“But take heed,” resumed the sculptor, anxious not to
violate the integrity of his own conscience. “Take heed;
for you love one another, and yet your bond is twined
with such black threads, that you must never look upon it
as identical with the ties that unite other loving souls. It
is for mutual support; it is for one another's final good;
it is for effort, for sacrifice, but not for earthly happiness.
If such be your motive, believe me, friends, it were better
to relinquish each other's hands at this sad moment.
There would be no holy sanction on your wedded life.”

“None,” said Donatello, shuddering. “We know it
well.”

“None,” repeated Miriam, also shuddering. “United—
miserably entangled with me, rather — by a bond of
guilt, our union might be for eternity, indeed, and most
intimate; but, through all that endless duration, I should
be conscious of his horror.”

“Not for earthly bliss, therefore,” said Kenyon, “but
for mutual elevation, and encouragement towards a severe
and painful life, you take each other's hands. And if,
out of toil, sacrifice, prayer, penitence, and earnest effort
towards right things, there comes, at length, a sombre and
thoughtful happiness, taste it, and thank Heaven! So
that you live not for it — so that it be a wayside flower,
springing along a path that leads to higher ends — it will
be Heaven's gracious gift, and a token that it recognizes
your union here below.”

[figure description] Page 118.[end figure description]

“Have you no more to say?” asked Miriam, earnestly.
“There is matter of sorrow and lofty consolation strangely
mingled in your words.”

“Only this, dear Miriam,” said the sculptor; “If ever,
in your lives, the highest duty should require from either
of you the sacrifice of the other, meet the occasion without
shrinking. This is all.”

While Kenyon spoke, Donatello had evidently taken in
the ideas which he propounded, and had ennobled them
by the sincerity of his reception. His aspect unconsciously
assumed a dignity, which, elevating his former
beauty, accorded with the change that had long been
taking place in his interior self. He was a man, revolving
grave and deep thoughts in his breast. He still held
Miriam's hand; and there they stood, the beautiful man,
the beautiful woman, united forever, as they felt, in the
presence of these thousand eye-witnesses, who gazed so
curiously at the unintelligible scene. Doubtless, the
crowd recognized them as lovers, and fancied this a betrothal
that was destined to result in life-long happiness.
And, possibly, it might be so. Who can tell where happiness
may come; or where, though an expected guest,
it may never show its face? Perhaps — shy, subtle
thing — it had crept into this sad marriage-bond, when the
partners would have trembled at its presence as a crime.

“Farewell!” said Kenyon, “I go to Rome.”

“Farewell, true friend!” said Miriam.

“Farewell!” said Donatello too. “May you be
happy. You have no guilt to make you shrink from
happiness.”

[figure description] Page 119.[end figure description]

At this moment it so chanced that all the three friends
by one impulse glanced upward at the statue of Pope Julius;
and there was the majestic figure stretching out the
hand of benediction over them, and bending down upon
this guilty and repentant pair its visage of grand benignity.
There is a singular effect oftentimes when, out of the
midst of engrossing thought and deep absorption, we suddenly
look up, and catch a glimpse of external objects.
We seem at such moments to look farther and deeper
into them, than by any premeditated observation; it is as
if they met our eyes alive, and with all their hidden
meaning on the surface, but grew again inanimate and
inscrutable the instant that they became aware of our
glances. So now at that unexpected glimpse, Miriam,
Donatello, and the sculptor, all three imagined that they
beheld the bronze pontiff endowed with spiritual life. A
blessing was felt descending upon them from his outstretched
hand; he approved by look and gesture the
pledge of a deep union that had passed under his auspices.

p576-437 CHAPTER XI. HILDA'S TOWER.

[figure description] Page 120.[end figure description]

When we have once known Rome, and left her where
she lies, like a long decaying corpse, retaining a trace of
the noble shape it was, but with accumulated dust and a
fungous growth overspreading all its more admirable features—
left her in utter weariness, no doubt, of her narrow,
crooked, intricate streets, so uncomfortably paved with little
squares of lava that to tread over them is a penitential
pilgrimage, so indescribably ugly, moreover, so cold, so
alley-like, into which the sun never falls, and where a
chill wind forces its deadly breath into our lungs — left
her, tired of the sight of those immense seven-storied,
yellow-washed hovels, or call them palaces, where all that
is dreary in domestic life seems magnified and multiplied,
and weary of climbing those staircases, which ascend
from a ground-floor of cook-shops, cobblers' stalls, stables,
and regiments of cavalry, to a middle region of princes,
cardinals, and ambassadors, and an upper tier of artists,
just beneath the unattainable sky — left her, worn out
with shivering at the cheerless and smoky fireside by day,
and feasting with our own substance the ravenous little

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populace of a Roman bed at night — left her, sick at
heart of Italian trickery, which has uprooted whatever
faith in man's integrity had endured till now, and sick at
stomach of sour bread, sour wine, rancid butter, and bad
cookery, needlessly bestowed on evil meats — left her,
disgusted with the pretence of holiness and the reality of
nastiness, each equally omnipresent — left her, half lifeless
from the languid atmosphere, the vital principle of
which has been used up long ago, or corrupted by myriads
of slaughters — left her, crushed down in spirit with the
desolation of her ruin, and the hopelessness of her future—
left her, in short, hating her with all our might, and
adding our individual curse to the infinite anathema which
her old crimes have unmistakably brought down, — when
we have left Rome in such mood as this, we are astonished
by the discovery, by-and-by, that our heartstrings
have mysteriously attached themselves to the Eternal
City, and are drawing us thitherward again, as if it were
more familiar, more intimately our home, than even the
spot where we were born.

It is with a kindred sentiment, that we now follow the
course of our story back through the Flaminian Gate,
and, treading our way to the Via Portoghese, climb the
staircase to the upper chamber of the tower, where we
last saw Hilda.

Hilda all along intended to pass the summer in Rome;
for she had laid out many high and delightful tasks, which
she could the better complete while her favorite haunts
were deserted by the multitude that thronged them,
throughout the winter and early spring. Nor did she

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dread the summer atmosphere, although generally held
to be so pestilential. She had already made trial of it,
two years before, and found no worse effect than a kind
of dreamy languor, which was dissipated by the first cool
breezes that came with autumn. The thickly populated
centre of the city, indeed, is never affected by the feverish
influence that lies in wait in the Campagna, like a besieging
foe, and nightly haunts those beautiful lawns and
woodlands, around the suburban villas, just at the season
when they most resemble Paradise. What the flaming
sword was to the first Eden, such is the malaria to these
sweet gardens and groves. We may wander through
them, of an afternoon, it is true, but they cannot be made
a home and a reality, and to sleep among them is death.
They are but illusions, therefore, like the show of gleaming
waters and shadowy foliage in a desert.

But Rome, within the walls, at this dreaded season, enjoys
its festal days, and makes itself merry with characteristic
and hereditary pastimes, for which its broad
piazzas afford abundant room. It leads its own life with
a freer spirit, now that the artists and foreign visitors are
scattered abroad. No bloom, perhaps, would be visible in
a cheek that should be unvisited, throughout the summer,
by more invigorating winds than any within fifty miles of
the city; no bloom, but yet, if the mind kept its healthy
energy, a subdued and colorless well-being. There was
consequently little risk in Hilda's purpose to pass the
summer days in the galleries of Roman palaces, and her
nights in that aërial chamber, whither the heavy breath of
the city and its suburbs could not aspire. It would

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probably harm her no more than it did the white doves, who
sought the same high atmosphere at sunset, and, when
morning came, flew down into the narrow streets, about
their daily business, as Hilda likewise did.

With the Virgin's aid and blessing, which might be
hoped for even by a heretic, who so religiously lit the
lamp before her shrine, the New England girl would
sleep securely in her old Roman tower, and go forth on
her pictorial pilgrimages without dread or peril. In view
of such a summer, Hilda had anticipated many months of
lonely, but unalloyed enjoyment. Not that she had a
churlish disinclination to society, or needed to be told that
we taste one intellectual pleasure twice, and with double
the result, when we taste it with a friend. But, keeping
a maiden heart within her bosom, she rejoiced in the
freedom that enabled her still to choose her own sphere,
and dwell in it, if she pleased, without another inmate.

Her expectation, however, of a delightful summer was
wofully disappointed. Even had she formed no previous
plan of remaining there, it is improbable that Hilda
would have gathered energy to stir from Rome. A torpor,
heretofore unknown to her vivacious though quiet
temperament, had possessed itself of the poor girl, like a
half-dead serpent knotting its cold, inextricable wreaths
about her limbs. It was that peculiar despair, that chill
and heavy misery, which only the innocent can experience,
although it possesses many of the gloomy characteristics
that mark a sense of guilt. It was that heartsickness,
which, it is to be hoped, we may all of us have
been pure enough to feel, once in our lives, but the

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capacity for which is usually exhausted early, and perhaps
with a single agony. It was that dismal certainty
of the existence of evil in the world, which, though we
may fancy ourselves fully assured of the sad mystery
long before, never becomes a portion of our practical
belief until it takes substance and reality from the sin of
some guide, whom we have deeply trusted and revered,
or some friend whom we have dearly loved.

When that knowledge comes, it is as if a cloud had
suddenly gathered over the morning light; so dark a
cloud, that there seems to be no longer any sunshine behind
it or above it. The character of our individual
beloved one having invested itself with all the attributes
of right, — that one friend being to us the symbol and
representative of whatever is good and true, — when he
falls, the effect is almost as if the sky fell with him,
bringing down in chaotic ruin the columns that upheld
our faith. We struggle forth again, no doubt, bruised and
bewildered. We stare wildly about us, and discover —
or, it may be, we never make the discovery — that it was
not actually the sky that has tumbled down, but merely
a frail structure of our own rearing, which never rose
higher than the house-tops, and has fallen because we
founded it on nothing. But the crash, and the affright
and trouble, are as overwhelming, for the time, as if the
catastrophe involved the whole moral world. Remembering
these things, let them suggest one generous motive
for walking heedfully amid the defilement of earthly
ways! Let us reflect, that the highest path is pointed
out by the pure Ideal of those who look up to us, and

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who, if we tread less loftily, may never look so high
again.

Hilda's situation was made infinitely more wretched by
the necessity of confining all her trouble within her own
consciousness. To this innocent girl, holding the knowledge
of Miriam's crime within her tender and delicate
soul, the effect was almost the same as if she herself had
participated in the guilt. Indeed, partaking the human
nature of those who could perpetrate such deeds, she felt
her own spotlessness impugned.

Had there been but a single friend — or, not a friend,
since friends were no longer to be confided in, after
Miriam had betrayed her trust — but, had there been any
calm, wise mind, any sympathizing intelligence; or, if
not these, any dull, half-listening ear into which she might
have flung the dreadful secret, as into an echoless cavern—
what a relief would have ensued! But this awful
loneliness! It enveloped her whithersoever she went.
It was a shadow in the sunshine of festal days; a mist
between her eyes and the pictures at which she strove to
look; a chill dungeon, which kept her in its gray twilight
and fed her with its unwholesome air, fit only for a criminal
to breathe and pine in! She could not escape from
it. In the effort to do so, straying farther into the intricate
passages of our nature, she stumbled, ever and
again, over this deadly idea of mortal guilt.

Poor sufferer for another's sin! Poor wellspring of a
virgin's heart, into which a murdered corpse had casually
fallen, and whence it could not be drawn forth again,
but lay there, day after day, night after night, tainting

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its sweet atmosphere with the scent of crime and ugly
death!

The strange sorrow that had befallen Hilda did not
fail to impress its mysterious seal upon her face, and to
make itself perceptible to sensitive observers in her manner
and carriage. A young Italian artist, who frequented
the same galleries which Hilda haunted, grew deeply interested
in her expression. One day, while she stood
before Leonardo da Vinci's picture of Joanna of Arragon,
but evidently without seeing it, — for, though it had attracted
her eyes, a fancied resemblance to Miriam had
immediately drawn away her thoughts, — this artist drew
a hasty sketch which he afterwards elaborated into a
finished portrait. It represented Hilda as gazing with
sad and earnest horror at a blood-spot which she seemed
just then to have discovered on her white robe. The
picture attracted considerable notice. Copies of an engraving
from it may still be found in the print-shops
along the Corso. By many connoisseurs, the idea of the
face was supposed to have been suggested by the portrait
of Beatrice Cenci; and, in fact, there was a look somewhat
similar to poor Beatrice's forlorn gaze out of the
dreary isolation and remoteness, in which a terrible doom
had involved a tender soul. But the modern artist
strenuously upheld the originality of his own picture, as
well as the stainless purity of its subject, and chose to
call it — and was laughed at for his pains — “Innocence,
dying of a blood-stain!”

“Your picture, Signor Panini, does you credit,” remarked
the picture-dealer, who had bought it of the

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young man for fifteen scudi, and afterwards sold it for ten
times the sum; “but it would be worth a better price if
you had given it a more intelligible title. Looking at
the face and expression of this fair signorina, we seem to
comprehend readily enough, that she is undergoing one
or another of those troubles of the heart to which young
ladies are but too liable. But what is this blood-stain?
And what has innocence to do with it? Has she stabbed
her perfidious lover with a bodkin?”

“She! she commit a crime!” cried the young artist.
“Can you look at the innocent anguish in her face, and
ask that question? No; but, as I read the mystery, a
man has been slain in her presence, and the blood, spirting
accidentally on her white robe, has made a stain
which eats into her life.”

“Then, in the name of her patron saint,” exclaimed
the picture-dealer, “why don't she get the robe made
white again at the expense of a few baiocchi to her
washer-woman? No, no, my dear Panini. The picture
being now my property, I shall call it `The Signorina's
Vengeance.' She has stabbed her lover overnight, and
is repenting it betimes the next morning. So interpreted,
the picture becomes an intelligible and very natural representation
of a not uncommon fact.”

Thus coarsely does the world translate all finer griefs
that meet its eye. It is more a coarse world than an unkind
one.

But Hilda sought nothing either from the world's delicacy
or its pity, and never dreamed of its misinterpretations.
Her doves often flew in through the windows of

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the tower, winged messengers, bringing her what sympathy
they could, and uttering soft, tender, and complaining
sounds, deep in their bosoms, which soothed the girl
more than a distincter utterance might. And sometimes
Hilda moaned quietly among the doves, teaching her
voice to accord with theirs, and thus finding a temporary
relief from the burden of her incommunicable sorrow, as
if a little portion of it, at least, had been told to these
innocent friends, and been understood and pitied.

When she trimmed the lamp before the Virgin's shrine,
Hilda gazed at the sacred image, and, rude as was the
workmanship, beheld, or fancied, expressed with the
quaint, powerful simplicity which sculptors sometimes
had five hundred years ago, a woman's tenderness responding
to her gaze. If she knelt, if she prayed, if her
oppressed heart besought the sympathy of divine womanhood
afar in bliss, but not remote, because forever humanized
by the memory of mortal griefs, was Hilda to
be blamed? It was not a Catholic kneeling at an idolatrous
shrine, but a child lifting its tear-stained face to
seek comfort from a mother.