Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber Part 6

The reckoning, I thought, could be no dubious or difficult matter. I knew the dishes I had eaten, and I saw the prices affixed, and I concluded that a simple arithmetical process would infallibly conduct me to the aggregate cost. But when my bill was handed me (a formality dispensed with in the case of those beside me), I found that my reckoning and that of "mine host" differed materially. The sum total on his showing was three times greater than on mine. I was curious to discover the source of this rather startling discrepancy in so small a sum. I went over again the list of eaten dishes, and once more went through the simple arithmetical process which gave the sum total of their cost, but with no difference in the result. It was plain that there was some mysterious quality in the arithmetic, or some nice distinctions in the cookery, which I had not taken into account, which disturbed my calculations. I became but the more anxious to have the riddle explained. In my perplexity I applied to the waiter, who referred me to his master. The day was hot; and boiling, stewing, and roasting, is hot work; and this may account for the pa.s.sion into which my simple interrogatory put "mine host." "It was a just bill, and must be paid." I hinted that I did not impugn its justice, but simply craved some explanation about its items. Whereupon mine host, becoming cooler, condescended to inform me that I had not dined exactly according to the _carte_; that certain additions had been made to certain dishes; and that it did not become an Englishman to inquire farther into the matter.

If not so satisfactory as might be wished, this defence was better than I had expected; so, paying my debts to Boniface, I departed, consoling myself with the reflection, that if I had three times more to pay than my neighbours, having fared neither better nor worse than they, I had, unlike these poor men, eaten my dinner without fetters on my hands.

This time the _banquette_ of the _diligence_, with all its rich views, was bespoke, so I had to content myself with the _interieur_. It was roomy, however; there were but four of us, and its window admitted, I found, ample views of meadow and mountain. We drove to the station of the Venice railway, pleasantly situated amid orchards and extra-mural albergos. The horses were taken out, and the immense vehicle was lifted up,--wheels, baggage, pa.s.sengers and all,--and put upon a truck. Away went the long line of carriages,--away went the _diligence_, standing up like a huge leathern castle upon its truck; while the engine whistled, snorted, screeched, groaned, and uttered all sorts of irreverent and every-day sounds, just as if the Alps had not been looking down upon it, and cla.s.sic towns ever and anon starting up beside its path: a glorious vision of fresh meadows, bordered with little ca.n.a.ls, brimful of water, and barred with the long shadows of campanile and sycamore,--for the sun was westering,--shot past us. The Alps came on with more slow and majestic pace. As peak after peak pa.s.sed by, it seemed as if the whole community of hills had commenced a general march on Monte Viso, with all their crags, glaciers, and pine-forests. One might have thought that Sovran Blanc had summoned the n.o.bles and high princes of his kingdom to meet him in his hall of audience, to debate some weighty point of Alpine government. An august a.s.sembly as ever graced monarch's court, in their robes of white and their cornets of eternal ice, would these tall and proud forms present.

Treviglio, beyond which the railway has not yet been opened, was reached in less than two hours. When near the town, the vast mirror of the blue Como, spread out amid the dark overhanging mountains, burst upon us.

From it flowed forth the Adda, which we crossed. As its mighty stream, burning in the sunset, rolled along, it spangled with glory the green plain, as the milky-way the firmament. There is nothing in nature like these Alpine rivers. They fill their banks with such a wasteful prodigality of water, and they go on their way with a conscious might, as if they felt that behind them is an eternally exhaustless source. Let the sun smite them with his fiercest ray; they dread him not. Others may shrink and dry up under his beam: their fountains are the snows of a thousand winters.

On reaching the station, our _diligence_,--including pa.s.sengers, and all that pertained to them,--was lifted from its truck and put on wheels, and once more stood ready to move, in virtue of its own inherent power, that is, so soon as the horses should be attached. This operation was performed in the calm eve, amid the glancing cas.e.m.e.nts of the little town, on which the purple hills and the tall silent poplars looked complacently down.

Away we rumbled, the declining light still resting sweetly on the woods and hamlets. There are no postilions in the world, I believe, who can handle their whip like those of Italy. In very pride and joy our postilion cracked his whip, till the woods rang again. He took a peculiar delight in startling the echoes of the old villages, and the ears of the old villagers. Each report was like that of a twelve-pounder. This continual thunder, kept up above their heads, did not in the least affright the horses: they rather seemed proud of a master who could handle his whip in so workmanlike a fas.h.i.+on. He could so time the strokes as to make not much worse melody than that of some music-bells I have heard. He could play a tune on his whip.

We pa.s.sed, as the evening thickened its shadows, several ancient _borgos_. Gray they were, and drowsy, as if the sleep of a century weighed them down. They seemed to love the quiet, dying light of eve; and as they drew its soft mantle around them, they appeared most willing to forget a world which had forgotten them. They had not always led so quiet a life. Their youth had been pa.s.sed amid the bustle of commerce; their manhood amid the alarms and rude shocks of war; and now, in their old age, they bore plainly the marks of the many shrewd brushes they had had to sustain when young. The houses were tall and roomy, and their architecture of a most substantial kind; but they had come to know strange tenants, that is, those of them that _had_ tenants, for not a few seemed empty. At the doors of others, dark withered faces looked out, as if wondering at the unusual din. I felt as if it were cruel to rouse these quiet slumber-loving towns, by dragging through their streets so noisy a vehicle as a _diligence_.

We pa.s.sed Caravaggio, famous as the birthplace of the two great painters who have both taken their name from their city,--the Caravacchi. We pa.s.sed, too, the little Mozonnica, that is, all of it which the calamities of the middle ages have left. Darkness then fell upon us,--if a firmament begemmed with large l.u.s.trous stars could be called dark.

The night wore on, varied only by two events of moment. The first was supper, for which we halted at about eleven o'clock, in the town of Chiari. At eleven at night people should think of sleeping,--not of eating. Not so in Italy, where supper is still the meal of the day. An Italian _diligence_ never breakfasts, unless a small cup of coffee, hurriedly s.n.a.t.c.hed while the horses are being put to, can be called such. Sometimes it does not even dine; but it never omits to sup. The supper chamber in Chiari was most sumptuously laid out,--vermicelli soup, flesh, fowls, cheese, pastry, wine,--every viand, in short, that could tempt the appet.i.te. But at midnight I refused to be tempted, though most of the other guests partook abundantly. I was much struck, on leaving the town, with the ma.s.sive architecture of the houses, the strength of the gates, and other monuments of former greatness. Imagine Edinburgh grown old and half-ruined, and you have a picture of the towns of Italy, which was a land of elegant stone-built cities at a time when the capitals of northern Europe were little better than collections of wooden sheds half-buried in mire.

There followed a long ride. Sleep, benignant G.o.ddess, looked in upon us, and helped to shorten the way. What surprised me not a little was, how soundly my companions snoozed, considering how they had supped. The stages pa.s.sed slowly and wearily. At length there came a long, a very long halt. I roused myself, and stepped out. I was in a s.p.a.cious street, with the cold biting wind blowing through it. The horses were away; the postilions had disappeared; some of the pa.s.sengers were perambulating the pavement, and the rest were fast asleep in the _diligence_, which stood on the causeway, like a stranded vessel on the beach. On consulting my watch, I found it was three in the morning, and in answer to my inquiries I was told that I was in Brescia,--a famous city; but I should have preferred to visit it at a more seasonable hour. "The best feelings," says the poet, "must have victual," and the most cla.s.sic towns must have sleep; so Brescia, forgetful that famous geographers who lived well-nigh two thousand years ago had mentioned its name, and that famous poets had sung its streams, and that it still contains innumerable relics of its high antiquity, slept on much as a Scotch village would have done at the same hour.

Time is of no value on the south of the Alps. This long halt at this unseasonable hour was simply to set down an honest woman who had come with us from Milan. She was as big well-nigh as the _diligence_ itself; but what caused all our trouble was, not herself, but her trunk. It lay at the bottom of an immense pile of baggage, which rose on the top of the vehicle; and before it could be got at, every article had to be taken down, and put on the pavement. Of course, the baggage had to be put back, and the operation was gone through most deliberately and leisurely. A full hour and a half was consumed in the process; and the pa.s.sengers, having no place to retire to, did their best to withstand the chill night air by a quick march on the street.

So, these silent midnight streets I was treading were those of Brescia,--Brescia, within whose walls had met the valour of the mountains and the arts of the plain. I was now treading where pagan temples had once stood, where Christian sanctuaries had next arisen, and where there had been disciples not a few when the light of the Reformation broke on northern Italy. I remembered, too, that this was the city of "Arnold of Brescia," one of the reformers before the Reformation. Arnold was a man of great learning, an intrepid champion of the Church's purity, and the founder of the "Arnoldists," who inherited the zeal and intrepidity of their master.

On the death of Innocent II., in the middle of the twelfth century, Arnold, finding Rome much agitated from the contests between the Pope and the Emperor, urged the Romans to throw off the yoke of a priest, and strike for their independence. The Romans lacked spirit to do so; and when, seven centuries afterwards, they came to make the attempt under Pius IX., they failed. Arnold was taken and crucified, his body reduced to ashes, and it was left to time, with its tragedies, to vindicate the wisdom of his advice, and avenge his blood; but to this hour no such opportunity of freeing themselves from thraldom as that which the Brescians then missed has presented itself.

"Time flows,--nor winds, Nor stagnates, nor precipitates his course; But many a benefit borne upon his breast For human-kind sinks out of sight, is gone, No one knows how; nor seldom is put forth An angry arm that s.n.a.t.c.hes good away, Never perhaps to re-appear."

CHAPTER XII.

THE PRESENT THE IMAGE OF THE PAST.

Failure of the Reformation in Italy--Causes of this--Italian Martyrs--Their great Numbers--Consequences of rejecting the Reformation--The _Present_ the Avenger of the _Past_--Extract from the _Siecle_ to this Effect--An "Accepted Time" for Nations--Alternative offered to the several European Nations in the Sixteenth Century--According to their Choice then, so is their Position now--Protestant and Popish Nations contrasted.

Of the singular interest that attaches to Italy during the first days of the Reformation I need not speak. The efforts of the Italians to throw off the papal yoke were great, but unsuccessful. Why these efforts came to nought would form a difficult but instructive subject of inquiry.

They failed, perhaps, partly from being made so near the centre of the Roman power,--partly from the want of union and comprehension in the plans of the Italian reformers,--partly by reason of the dependence of the petty princes of the country upon the Pope,--and partly because the great sovereigns of Europe, although not unwilling that the Papacy should be weakened in their own country, by no means wished its extinction in Italy. But though Italy did not reach the goal of religious freedom, the roll of her martyrs includes the names of statesmen, scholars, n.o.bles, priests, and citizens of all ranks. From the Alps to Sicily there was not a province in which there were not adherents of the doctrines of the Reformation, nor a city of any note in which there was not a little church, nor a man of genius or learning who was not friendly to the movement. There was scarce a prison whose walls did not immure some disciple of the Lord Jesus; and scarce a public square which did not reflect the gloomy light of the martyr's pile. Much has been done, by mutilating the public records, to consign these events to oblivion, and the names of many of the martyrs have been irretrievably lost; still enough remains to show that the doctrines of the Reformation were then widely spread, and that the numbers who suffered for them in Italy were great. Need I mention the names of Milan, of Vicenza, of Verona, of Venice, of Padua, of Ferrara,--one of the brightest in this constellation,--of Bologna, of Florence, of Sienna, of Rome? Most of these cities are renowned in the cla.s.sic annals; all of them shared in the wealth and independence which the commerce of the middle ages conferred on the Italian republics; all of them figure in the revival of letters in the fifteenth century; but they are encompa.s.sed by a holier and yet more unfading halo, as the spots where the Italian reformers lived,--where they preached the blessed truths of the Bible to their countrymen,--and where they sealed their testimony with their blood. "During the whole of this century," that is, the sixteenth, says Dr M'Crie, in his "Progress and Suppression of the Reformation in Italy," "the prisons of the Inquisition in Italy, and particularly at Rome, were filled with victims, including persons of n.o.ble birth, male and female, men of letters, and mechanics. Mult.i.tudes were condemned to penance, to the galleys, or other arbitrary punishments; and from time to time individuals were put to death." "The following description," says the same historian, "of the state of matters in 1568 is from the pen of one who was residing at that time on the borders of Italy:--'At Rome some are every day burnt, hanged, or beheaded. All the prisons and places of confinement are filled; and they are obliged to build new ones. That large city cannot furnish jails for the number of pious persons which are continually apprehended.'"

I had time to ruminate on these things as I paced to and fro in the empty midnight streets of Brescia. Methought I could hear, in the silent night, the cry of the martyrs whose ashes sleep in the plains around, saying, "How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth!" Yes; G.o.d has judged, and is avenging; and the doom takes the very form that the crime wore. An era of dungeons, and chains, and victims, has again come round to Italy; but this time it is "the men which dwell on the" papal "earth" that are suffering. When the Italians permitted Arnold, and thousands such as he, to be put to death, they were just opening the way for the wrath of the Papacy to reach themselves, which it has now done. Ah! little do those who gnash their teeth in the extremity of their torments, and curse the priests as the authors of these, reflect that their own and their fathers' wickedness, still unrepented of, has not less to do with their present miseries than the priestly tyranny which they so bitterly and justly execrate. In those ages these men were the _tools_ of the priesthood; in this they are its _victims_. Thus it is that the Present, in papal Europe, and especially in Italy, rises stamped with the likeness of the Past. The _Siecle_ of Paris, while the _Siecle_ was yet free, brought out this fact admirably, when it reminded the champions of Popery that the horrors of the first French Revolution were not new things, but old, which the Jacobins inherited from the Papists; and went on to ask them "if they have forgotten that the Convention found all the laws of the Terror written upon the past? The Committee of Public Safety was first contrived for the benefit of the monarchy. Were not the commissions called revolutionary tribunals first used against the Protestants? The drums which Santerre beat round the scaffolds of royalists followed a practice first adopted to drown the psalms of the reformed pastors. Were not the fusilades first used at the bidding of the priests to crush heresy? Did not the law of the suspected compel Protestants to nourish soldiers in their houses, as a punishment for refusing to go to ma.s.s? Were not the houses burned down of those who frequented Protestant preaching? Were not the properties of the Protestant emigrants confiscated? Did not the Marshal Nouilles order a war against bankers? Was not the law of the maximum, which regulated prices, practised by the regency? Was not the law of requisition for the public roads practised to prepare the roads for Queen Marie Leczinska?

It is true, many priests perished in the Terror, but they were men of terror peris.h.i.+ng by terror,--men of the sword peris.h.i.+ng by the sword."

I could not help feeling, too, when reflecting upon the state of Brescia, and of all the towns of Italy, and, indeed, of all the countries of Europe, that to nations, as well as individuals, there is "an accepted time" and a "day of salvation," which if they miss, they irremediably perish. If they enter not in when the door is open, it is in vain that they knock when it is shut. The same sentiment has been expressed by our great poet, in the well-known lines,--

"There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their lives is bound In shallows and in miseries."

The sixteenth century started the European nations in a new career, and put it in the power of each to choose the principle of will or authority,--the compendious principle according to which both Church and State were governed under the Papacy, or that of law,--expressing not the will of one man, but the collective reason of the nation,--the distinctive principle of government under Protestantism. The century in question placed government by the canon law or government by the Bible side by side, and invited the nations of Europe to make their choice.

The nations made their choice. Some ranged themselves on this side, some on that; and the sixteenth century saw them standing abreast, like compet.i.tors at the ancient Olympic games, ready, on the signal being given, to dart forward in the race for victory.

They did not stand abreast, be it observed. The several compet.i.tors in this high race did not start on equally advantageous terms. The rich and powerful nations declared for Popery and arbitrary government; the weak and third-rate ones, for Protestantism. On one side stood Spain, then at the head of Europe,--rich in arts, in military glory, in the genius and chivalry of its people, in the resources of its soil, and mistress, besides, of splendid colonies. By her side stood France,--the equal of Spain in art, in civilization, in military genius, and inferior only to her proud neighbour in the single article of colonies. Austria came next, and then Italy. Such were the ill.u.s.trious names ranged on the one side. All of them were powerful, opulent, highly civilized; and some of them cherished the recollections of imperishable renown, which is a mighty power in itself. We have no such names to recount on the other side. Those nations which entered the lists against the others were but second and third-rate Powers: Britain, which scarce possessed a foot-breadth of territory beyond her own island,--Holland, a country torn from the waves,--the Netherlands and Prussia, neither of which were of much consideration. In every particular the Protestant nations were inferior to the Papal nations, save in the single article of their Protestantism: nevertheless, that one quality has been sufficient to counterbalance, and far more than counterbalance, all the advantages possessed by the others. Since the day we speak of, what a different career has been that of these nations! Three centuries have sufficed to reverse their position. Civilization, glory, extent of territory, and material wealth, have all pa.s.sed over from the one side to the other. Of the Protestant nations, Britain alone is more powerful than the whole of combined Europe in the sixteenth century.

But, what is remarkable also, we find the various nations of Europe at this hour on the same side on which they ranged themselves in the sixteenth century. Those that neglected the opportunity which that century brought them of adopting Protestantism and a free government are to this day despotic. France has submitted to three b.l.o.o.d.y revolutions, in the hope of recovering what she criminally missed in the sixteenth century; but her tears and her blood have been shed in vain. The course of Spain, and that of the Italian States, have been not unsimilar. They have plunged into revolutions in quest of liberty, but have found only a deeper despotism. They have dethroned kings, proclaimed new const.i.tutions, brought statesmen and citizens by thousands to the block; they have agonized and bled; but they have been unable to reverse their fatal choice at the Reformation.

CHAPTER XIII.

SCENERY OF LAKE GARDA--PESCHIERA--VERONA.

Lake Garda--Memories of Trent--The Council of Trent fixed the Destiny as well as Creed of Rome--Questions for Infallibility--Why should Infallibility have to grope its Way?--Why does it reveal Truth piecemeal?--Why does it need a.s.sessors?--The Immaculate Conception--Town of Desenzano--Magnificent Bullocks--Land of Virgil--Grandeur of Lake Garda--The Iron Peschiera--The Cypress Tree--Verona--Imposing Appearance of its Exterior--Richness and Beauty of surrounding Plains--Palmerston.

When the morning broke we were skirting the base of the Tyrolese Alps. I could see ma.s.ses of snow on some of the summits, from which a piercingly cold air came rus.h.i.+ng down upon the plains. In a little the sun rose; and thankful we were for his warmth. Day was again abroad on the waters and the hills; and soon we forgot the night, with all its untoward occurrences. The face of the country was uneven; and we kept alternately winding and climbing among the spurs of the Alps. At length the magnificent expanse of Lake Garda, the Benacus of the ancients, opened before us. In breadth it was like an arm of the sea. There were one or two tall-masted s.h.i.+ps on its waters; there were fine mountains on its northern sh.o.r.e; and on the east the conspicuous form of Monte Baldo leaned over it, as if looking at its own shadow in the lake. With the Lago di Garda came the memories of Trent; for at the distance of twenty miles or so from its northern sh.o.r.e is "the little town among the mountains," where the famous Council a.s.sembled, in which so many things were voted to be true which had been open questions till then, but to doubt which now were certain and eternal anathema.

The Reformation addressed to Rome the last call to reconsider her position, and change her course while yet it was possible. It said to her, in effect, Repent now: to-morrow it will be too late. Rome gave her reply when she summoned the Council of Trent. That Council crystallized, so to speak, the various doubtful opinions and dogmas which had been floating about in solution, and fixed the creed of Rome. It did more,--it fixed her doom. Amid these mountains she issued the fiat of her fate. When she published the proceedings of Trent to the world, she said, "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise; so help me----." To whom did she make her appeal? To the Emperor in the first place, when she prayed for the vengeance of the civil sword; and to the Prince of Darkness in the second, when she invoked d.a.m.nation on all her opponents. Then her course was irrevocably fixed. She dare not now look behind her: to change a single iota were annihilation. She must go forward, amid acc.u.mulating errors, and absurdities, and blasphemies: amid opposing arts and sciences, and knowledge, she must go steadily onward,--onward to the precipice!

It is interesting to mark, as we can in history, first, the feeble germinations of a papal dogma; next, its waxing growth; and at last, after the lapse of centuries, its full development and maturity. It is easy to conceive how a mere human science should advance only by slow and gradual stages,--astronomy, for instance, or geology, or even the more practical science of mechanics. Their authors have no infallible gift of discerning truth from error. They must observe nature; they must compare facts; they must deduce conclusions; they must correct previous errors; and this is both a slow and a laborious process. But Infallibility is saved all this labour. It knows at once, and from the beginning, all that is true, and all that is erroneous. It does so, or it is not Infallibility. Why, then, was it not till the sixteenth century that Infallibility gave anything like a fixed and complete creed to the Church? Why did it permit so many men, in all preceding ages, to live in ignorance of so many things in which it could so easily have enlightened them? Why did it permit so many questions to be debated, which it could so easily have settled? Why did it not give that creed to the Church in the first century which it kept back till the sixteenth?

Why does it deal out truth piecemeal,--one dogma in this century, another in the next, and so on? Why does it not tell us all at once? And why, even to this hour, has it not told us all, but reserved some very important questions for future decision, or revelation rather?

If it is replied that the Pope must first collect the suffrages of the Catholic bishops, this only lands us in deeper perplexities. Why should the Pope need a.s.sessors and advisers? Can Infallibility not walk alone, that it uses crutches? Can an infallible man not know truth from error till first he has collected the votes of fallible bishops? Why should Infallibility seek help, which it cannot in the nature of things need?

If it is further replied, that this Infallibility is lodged betwixt the Pope and the Council, we are only confronted with greater difficulties.

Is it when the decree has been voted by the Council that it becomes infallible? Then the Infallibility resides in the Council. Or is it when it is confirmed by the Pope that it becomes infallible? In that case the Infallibility is in the Pope. Or is it, as others maintain, only when the decree has been accepted by the Church that it is infallible, and does the Pope not know whether he ought to believe his own decree till he has heard the judgment of the Church? We had thought that Infallibility was one and indivisible; but it seems it may be parted in twain; nay, more, it may be broken down into an indefinite number of parts; and though no one of these parts taken separately is Infallibility, yet taken together they const.i.tute Infallibility. In other words, the union of a number of finite quant.i.ties can make an infinite. Sound philosophy, truly!

If we go back, then, as the Ultramontanist will, to the dogma that the seat of Infallibility is the chair of Peter, the question returns, why cannot, or will not, the Pope determine in one age what he is able and willing to determine in another? The dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin, for instance, if it is a truth now, was a truth in the first age, when it was not even dreamed of; it was a truth in the twelfth century, when it _was_ dreamed of; it was a truth in the seventeenth century, when it gave rise to so many scandalous divisions and conflicts; and yet it was not till December 1854 that Infallibility p.r.o.nounced it to be a truth, and so momentous a truth, that no one can be saved who doubts it. Will any Romanist kindly explain this to us? We can accept no excuses about the variety of opinion in the Church, or about the darkness of the age. No haze, no clouds, can dim an infallible eye. Infallibility should see in the dark as well as in the daylight; and an infallible teacher is bound to reveal all, as well as to know all.

And how happens it, too, that the Pope is infallible in only one science,--even the theological? In astronomy he has made some terrible blunders. In geography he has taken the earth to be a plain. In politics, in trade, and in all ordinary matters, he is daily falling into mistakes. He cannot tell how the wind may blow to-morrow. He cannot tell whether the dish before him may not have poison in it. And yet the man who is daily and hourly falling into mistakes on the most common subjects has only to p.r.o.nounce dogmatically, and he p.r.o.nounces infallibly. He has but to grasp the pen, with a hand, it may be, like Borgia's, fresh from the poisoned chalice or the stiletto, and straightway he indites lines as holy and pure as ever flowed from the pen of a Paul or a John!

The road now led down upon the lake, which lay gleaming like a sheet of silver beneath the morning sun. We entered the poor, faded, straggling town of Desenzano, where the usual motley a.s.semblage of commissionaires, albergo-masters, dwarfs, beggars, and idlers of all kinds, waited to receive us. The poor old town crept close in to the strand, as if a draught of the crystal waters would make it young again. It reminded me of the company of halt, blind, and impotent folk which lay at the pool of Bethesda. So lay paralytic Desenzano by the sh.o.r.es of the Lake Garda.

Alas! suns.h.i.+ne and storm pa.s.s across the scene, clothing the waters and the hills with alternate beauty and grandeur; but all changes come alike to the poor, tradeless, bookless, spiritless town. Whether summer comes in its beauty or winter in its storms, Desenzano is old, withered, dying Desenzano still. I hurried to an albergo, swallowed a cup of coffee, and rejoined the _diligence_.

Our course lay along the southern sh.o.r.e of the lake, over a fine rolling country, richly covered with vineyards, and where the rich red soil was being ploughed with bullocks. Such bullocks I had never before seen. The stateliest of their kind which graze the meadows of England and Scotland are but as gra.s.shoppers in comparison. Truly, I saw before me the Anakims of the cattle tribe. To them the yoke was no burden. As they marched on with vast outspread horns, they could have dragged a hundred ploughs after them. They were not unworthy of Virgil's verse. And it gave additional charms to the region to think that Mantua, the poet's birthplace, lay not a long way to the south, and that, doubtless, the author of the Bucolics often visited in his youth this very spot, and walked by the margin of these waters, and marked the light and shade on these n.o.ble hills; or, turning to the rich agricultural country on the right, had seen exactly such bullocks as those I now saw, drawing exactly such ploughs, and making exactly such furrows in the red earth; and, spreading the beauty of his own mind over the picture, he had gone and imprinted it eternally on his page. The true poet is a real clairvoyant. He may not give you the shape, or colour, or size of objects; he may not tell how tall the mountains, or how long the hedge-rows, or how broad the fields; but by some wonderful art he can convey to your mind what is present to his own. On this principle it was, perhaps, that the landscape, with all its scenery, was familiar to me. I had seen it long years before. These were the very fields, the very bullocks, the very ploughs, the very swains, my imagination had painted in my schoolboy days, when I sat with the page of the great pastoral poet of Italy open before me,--too frequently, alas! only open.

On these sh.o.r.es, too, had dwelt the poet Catullus; and a doubtful ruin which the traveller sees on the point of the long sharp promontory of Sermio, which runs up into the lake from the south, still bears the name of Catullus' Villa. If these are the ruins of Catullus' house, which is very questionable, he must have lived in a style of magnificence which has fallen to the lot of but few poets.

The complexion of a day or of a lifetime may hang upon the commonest occurrence. A shoe here dropped from the foot of one of the horses; and the postilion, diving into the recesses of the _diligence_, and drawing forth a box with the requisite tools, began forthwith, on the highway, the process of shoeing. I stepped out, and walked on before, thankful for the incident, which had given me the opportunity of a saunter along the road. You can _see_ nature from the windows of your carriage, but you can _converse_ with her only by a quiet stroll amidst her scenes. On the right were the great plains which the Po waters, finely mottled with meadow and corn-field, besprint with chestnut trees, mulberries, and laurels, and fringed, close by the highway, with rolling heights, on which grew the vine. On the left was the far expanding lake, with its bays and creeks, and the shadows of its stately hills mirrored on its surface. It looked as if some invisible performer was busy s.h.i.+fting the scenes for the traveller's delight, and spreading a different prospect before his eye at every few yards. New bays were continually opening, and new peaks rising on the horizon. "It was so rough with tempests when we pa.s.sed by it," says Addison, "that it brought into my mind Virgil's description of it."

"Here, vexed by winter storms, _Benacus_ raves, Confused with working sands and rolling waves; Rough and tumultuous, like a sea it lies; So loud the tempest roars, so high the billows rise."

I saw it in more peaceful mood. Cool and healthful breezes were blowing from the Tyrol; and the salubrious character of the region was amply attested by the robust forms of the inhabitants. I have seldom seen a finer race of men and women than the peasants adjoining the Lake Garda.

They were all of goodly stature, and singularly graceful and n.o.ble in their gait.

In a few hours we approached the strong fortress of Peschiera. We pa.s.sed through several concentric lines of fortifications, walls, moats, drawbridges, and sloping earthen embankments, in which cart-loads of b.a.l.l.s, impelled with all the force which powder can give, would sink and be lost. In the very heart of these grim ramparts, like a Swiss hamlet amid its mountain ranges, or a jewel in its iron-bound casket, lay the little town of Peschiera, sleeping quietly beside the blue and full-flooded Mincio, Virgil's own river:--

"Where the slow Mincius through the valley strays; Where cooling streams invite the flocks to drink, And reeds defend the winding water's brink."

It issues from the lake, and, flowing underneath the ramparts, freshens a spot which otherwise wears sufficiently the grim iron-visaged features of war. Nothing can surpa.s.s the grandeur of Lake Garda, which here almost touches the walls of the fortress. It lies outspread like the sea, and runs far up to where the snow-clad summits of the Tyrol prop the northern horizon.

Leaving behind us the iron Peschiera and the blue Garda, we held on our way over an open, breezy country, where the stony and broken scenery of the mountains began to mingle with the rich cultivation of the plains.