Chapter IX Long Journey
The journey which I undertook when my home duties ended at the death of my father, would be considered a very moderate excursion in these latter days, but in 1857 it was still accounted somewhat of an enterprise for a “lone woman.” When I told my friends that I was going to Egypt and Jerusalem, they said: “Ah, you will get as far as Rome and Naples, and that will be very interesting; but you will find too many difficulties in the way of going any further,” “When I say” (I replied) “that I am going to Egypt and Jerusalem, I mean that to Egypt and Jerusalem I shall go.” And so, as it proved, a wilful woman had her way; and I came back after a year with the ever-delightful privilege of observing: “I told you so.”
I shall not dream of dragging the reader again over the well-worn ground at the slow pace of a writer of “Impressions de Voyage.” The best of my reminiscences were given to the world, in Fraser’s Magazine, and reprinted in my Cities of the Past, before there was yet a prospect of a railway to Jerusalem except in Martin’s picture of the “End of the World”; or of a “Service d’omnibus” over the wild solitudes of Lebanon, where I struggled ‘mid snows and torrents which nearly whelmed me and my horse in destruction. I rejoice to think that I saw those holy and wonderful lands of Palestine and Egypt while Cook’s tourists were yet unborn, and Cairo had only one small English hotel and one solitary wheel carriage; and the solemn gaze of the Sphinx encountered no Golf-games on the desert sands.
My proceedings were very much like those of certain birds of the farmyard (associated particularly with Michaelmas), who very rarely are seen to rise on the wing but when they are once incited to do so, are wont to take a very wide circle in their flight before they come back to the barn door!
Paris, Marseilles, Rome, Naples, Messina, Malta, Alexandria, Cairo, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Dead Sea, Jordan, Beyrout, Lebanon, Baalbec, Cyprus, Rhodes, Smyrna, Athens, Constantinople, Cape Matapan, Corfu, Trieste, Adelsberg, Venice, Florence, Milan, Lucerne, Geneva, Wiesbaden, Antwerp, London—such was my “swoop,” accomplished in 11 months and at a cost of only £400. To say that I brought home a crop of new ideas would be a small way of indicating the whole harvest of them wherewith I returned laden. There were (I think I may summarise), as the results of such a journey, the following great additions to my mental stock.
First. A totally fresh conception of the glory and beauty of Nature. When crossing the Channel I fell into talk with a charming old lady and told her how I was looking forward to seeing the great pictures and buildings of Italy. “Ah,” she said, “but there is Italian Nature to be seen also. Do not miss it, looking only at works of art. I go to Italy to see it much more than the galleries and churches.” I was very much astonished at this remark, but I came home after some months spent in a villa on Bellosguardo entirely converted to her view. Travellers there are who weary their feet and strain their eyes till they can no longer see or receive impressions from the miles of painted canvas, the regiments of statues, and the streets of palaces and churches wherewith Italy abounds; yet have never spent a day riding over the desolate Campagna with the far off Apennines closing the horizon, or enjoyed nights of paradise, sitting amid the cypresses and the garlanded vines, with the stars overhead, the nightingales singing, and the fireflies darting around among the Rose de Maggio. Such travellers may come back to England proud of having verified every line of Murray on the spot, yet they have failed to “see Italy” altogether. Never shall I forget the revelation of loveliness of the Ægean and Ionian seas, of the lower slopes of Lebanon, and of the Acropolis of Athens, seen, as I saw it first, at sunrise. But when my heaviest journeys were done and I paused and rested in Villa Niccolini, with Florence below and the Val d’ Arno before me, I felt as if the beauty of the world, as I then and there saw it, were joy enough for a lifetime. The old lines (I know not whose they are) kept ringing in my ears.—
“And they shall summer high in bliss
Upon the hills of God.”
I shall quote here some verses which I wrote at that time, as they described the scene in which I lived and revelled.
THE FESTA OF THE WORLD.
A Princess came to a southern strand,
Over a summer sea;
And the sky smiled down on the laughing land,
For that land was Italy.
The fruit trees bent their laden boughs
O’er the fields with harvest gold,
And the rich vines wreathed from tree to tree,
Like garlands in temples old.
And over all fell the glad sunlight,
So warm, so bright, so clear!
The earth shone out like an emerald set
In the diamond atmosphere.
Then down to greet that lady sweet
Came the Duke from his palace hall:
“I thank thee, gentle Sire,” she cried,
“For thy princely festival.”
“For honoured guests have towns ere now
Been decked right royally;
But thy whole land is garlanded
One bower of bloom for me!”
Then smiled the Duke at the lady’s thought,
And the thanks he had lightly won;
For Nature’s eternal Festa-day
She deemed for her alone!
A Poet stood by the Princess’s side;
“O lady raise thine eye,
The Giver of this great Festival,
He dwelleth in yon blue sky.
“Thy kinsman Prince hath welcomed thee,
But God hath His world arrayed
Not more for thee than yon beggar old
Who sleeps ’neath the ilex shade.
“His sun doth shine on the peasant’s fields,
His rain on his vineyard pour,
His flowers bloom by the worn wayside
And creep o’er the cottage door.
“For each, for all is a welcome given
And spread the world’s great feast;
And the King of Kings is the loving Host
And each child of man a guest.”13
The beauty of Switzerland has at no time touched me as that of Italy has always done. There is something in the sharp, hard atmosphere of Switzerland (and I may add in the sharp, hard characters of the Swiss) which disenchants me in the grandest scenes.
The second thing one learns in a journey like mine is, of course, the wondrous achievements of human Art,—Temples and Churches, fountains and obelisks, pyramids and statues and pictures without end. But on this head I need say nothing. Enough has been said and to spare by those far more competent than I to write of it.
Lastly, there is a thing which I, at all events, learned by knocking about the world. It is the enormous amount of pure human good nature which is to be found almost everywhere. I should weary the reader to tell all the little kindnesses done to me by fellow-passengers in the railways and steamers, and by the Captains of the vessels in which I sailed; and of the trouble which strangers took to help me out of my small difficulties. Of course men do not meet—because they do not want,—such services; and women, who travel with men, or even two or three together, seldom invite them. But for viewing human nature en beau, commend me to a long journey by a woman of middle age, of no beauty, and travelling as cheaply as possible, alone.
I believe the Psychical Society has started a theory that when places where crimes have been committed are ever after “haunted” the apparitions are not exactly good, old-fashioned real ghosts, if I may use such an expression, but some sort of atmospheric photographs (the term is my own) left by the parties concerned, or sent telepathically from their present habitat (wherever that may be) to the scene of their earthly suffering or wickedness. The hypothesis, of course, relieves us from the very unpleasant surmise that the actual soul of the victims of assassination and robbery may have nothing better to do in a future life than to stand guard perpetually at the dark and dank corners, cellars, and bottoms of stone staircases, where they were cruelly done to death fifty or a hundred years before; or to loaf like detectives about the spots where their jewelry and cash-boxes (so useful and important to a disembodied spirit!) lie concealed. But the atmospheric photograph or magic-lantern theory, whatever truth it may hold, exactly answers to a sense which I should think all my readers must have experienced, as I have done, in certain houses and cities; a sense as if the crimes which had been committed therein have left an indescribable miasma, a lurid, impalpable shadow, like that of the ashes of the Polynesian volcano which darkened the sun for a year; or shall we say, like the unrecognised effluvium which probably caused Mrs. Sleeman, in her tent, to dream she was surrounded by naked murdered men, while 14 corpses were actually lying beneath her bed and were next day disinterred?14 Walking once through Holyrood with Dr. John Brown (who had not visited the place for many years), I was quite overcome by this sense of ancient crime, perpetuated as it seemed, almost like a physical phenomenon in those gloomy chambers; and on describing my sensations, Dr. Brown avowed that he experienced a very similar impression. It would almost seem as if moral facts of a certain intensity, begin to throw a cloudy shadow of Evil, as Romist saints were said to exhale an odour of sanctity.
If there be a city in the world where this sense is most vivid, I think it is Rome. I have felt it also in Paris, but Rome is worst. The air (not of the Campagna with all its fevers, but of the city itself) seems foul with the blood and corruption of a thousand years. On the finest spring day, in the grand open spaces of the Piazza del Popolo, San Pietro, and the Forum, it is the same as in the darkest and narrowest streets. No person sensitive to this impression can be genuinely light-hearted and gay in Rome, as we often are even in our own gloomy London. Perhaps this is sheer fancifulness on my part, but I have been many times in Rome, twice for an entire winter, and the same impression never failed to overcome me. On my last visit I nearly died there and it was not to be described how earnestly I longed to emerge, as if out of one of Dante’s Giri, “anywhere, anywhere out of” this Rome!
On the occasion of my first journey at Christmas, 1857, I stopped only three weeks in the Eternal City and then went on by sea to Naples. I was ill from the fatigues and anxieties of the previous weeks, and after a few half-dazed visits to the Colosseum, the Vatican, and Shelley’s grave, I found myself unable to leave my solitary fourth-floor room in the Europa. A card was brought to me one day while thus imprisoned, bearing names (unknown to me) of “Mr. and Mrs. Robert Apthorp,” and with the singular message: “Was I the Miss Cobbe who had corresponded with Theodore Parker in America?” My first impression was one of alarm. “What! more trouble about my heresies still?” It was, however, quite a different matter. My visitors were a gentleman (a real American gentleman) and his wife, with two ladies who were all among Parker’s intimate friends in America, and to whom he had showed my letters. They came to hold out to me the right hands of fellowship; and friends indeed we became, in such thorough sort that, after seven-and-thirty years I am corresponding with dear Mrs. Apthorp still. She and her sister nursed me through my illness; and thus my solitude in Rome came to an end.
Naples struck me on my first visit, as it has done again and again, as presenting the proof that the Beautiful is not by itself, a root out of which the Good spontaneously grows. If we want to cultivate Purity, Honesty, Veracity, Unselfishness or any other virtue, it is vain to think we shall achieve our end by giving the masses pretty pleasure-grounds and “Palaces of Delight,” or even æsthetic cottages with the best reproductions of Botticelli adorning the walls. Do what we may we can never hope to surround our working men with such beauty as that of the Bay of Naples, nor to show them Art to equal the treasures of the Museo Borbonico. And what has come of all this familiar revelling in Beauty for centuries and millenniums to the people of Naples? Only that they resemble more closely in ignorance, in squalor and in degradation the most wretched Irish who dwell in mud cabins amid the bogs, than any other people in Europe.
I had intended remaining for some time to recuperate at Naples and took a cheery little room in a certain Pension Schiassi (now abolished) on the Chiajia. In this Pension I met a number of kindly and interesting people of various nationalities; the most pleasant and cultivated of all being Finns from Helsingfors. It was a great experience to me to enter into some sort of society again, far removed from all my antecedents; no longer the mistress of a large house and dispenser of its hospitality, but a wandering tourist, known to nobody and dressed as plainly as might be. I find I wrote to my old friend, Miss St. Leger, on the subject under date January 21st, 1858, as follows: “I am really cheerful now. Those days in the country (at Cumæ and Capo di Monte) cheered me very much, and I am beginning altogether to look at the future differently. There is one thing I feel really happy about. I see now my actual position towards people, divested of the social advantages I have hitherto held; and I find it a very pleasant one. I don’t think I deceive myself in imagining that people easily like me, and get interested in my ideas, while I find abundance to like and esteem in a large proportion of those I meet.” (Optimism, once more! the reader will say!)
It was not, however, “all beer and skittles” for me at the Schiassi pension. I had, as I have mentioned, taken a pretty little room looking out on the Villa Reale and the Bay and Vesuvius, and had put up the photographs and miniatures I carried with me and my little knick-knacks on the writing-table, and fondly flattered myself I should sit and write there peacefully. But I reckoned without my neighbours! It was Sunday when I arrived and settled myself so complacently. On Monday morning, soon after day-break, I was rudely awakened by a dreadful four-handed strumming on a piano, apparently in my very room! On rousing myself, I perceived that a locked door close to my bed obviously opened into an adjoining chamber, and being (after the manner of Italian doors) at least two inches short of the uncarpeted floor, I was to all acoustic intents and purposes actually in the room with this atrocious jangling piano and the two thumping performers! The practising went on for two hours, and when it stopped a masculine voice arose to read the Bible aloud in family devotions. Then, after a brief interval for breakfast, burst out again the intolerable strumming. I fled, and remained out of doors for hours, but when I came back they were at it again! I appealed to the mistress of the house, in vain. Sir Andrew——and his daughters (I will call them the Misses Shocking-strum, their real name concerns nobody now) had been there before me and would no doubt stop long after me, and could not be prevented from playing from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day of the week. I took a large card and wrote on it this pathetic appeal:—
“Pity the sorrows of a poor old maid,
Whose hapless lot has made her lodge next door,
Who fain would wish those morning airs delayed;
O practise less! And she will bless you more!”
I thrust this under the ill-fitting door well into the music-room, and waited anxiously for some measure of mercy to be meted to me in consequence. But no! the hateful thumping and crashing went on as before. Then I girded up my loins and went down to the packet office and took a berth in the next steamer for Alexandria.
After landing at Messina (lovely region!) and at Malta, I embarked in a French screw-steamer, which began to roll before we were well under weigh, and which, when a real Levanter came on three days later, played pitch and toss with us passengers, insomuch that we often needed to lie on mattresses on the floor and hold something to prevent our heads from being knocked to pieces. One day, being fortunately a very good sailor, I scrambled up on deck and beheld a glorious scene. Euroclydon was playing with towering waves of lapis-lazulæ all flecked and veined like a horse’s neck with white foam, and the African sun was shining down cloudless over the turmoil.
There were some French Nuns on board going to a convent in Cairo, where they were to be charitably engaged taking care of girls. The monastic mind is always an interesting study. It brings us back to the days of Bede, and times when miracles (if it be not a bull to say so) were the rule and the ordinary course of nature the exception. People are then constantly seen where they are not, and not seen where they are; and the dead are as “prominent citizens” of this world (as an American would say) as the living. Meanwhile the actual geography and history of the modern world and all that is going on in politics, society, art and literature, is as dark to the good Sister or Brother as if she or he had really (as in Hans Andersen’s story) “walked back into the eleventh century.” My nice French nuns were very kind and instructive to me. They told me of the Virgin’s Tree which we should see at Heliopolis (though they knew nothing of the obelisk there), and they informed me that if anyone looked out on Trinity Sunday exactly at sunrise, he would see “toutes les trois personnes de la sainte Trinité.”
I could not help asking: “Madame les aura vues?”
“Pas précisément, Madame. Madame sait qu’à cette saison le soleil se lêve bien tôt.”
“Mais, Madame, pour voir loutes les trois personnes?”
It was no use. The good soul persisted in believing what she liked to believe and took care never to get up and look out on Trinity Sunday morning,—just as ten thousand Englishmen and women, who think themselves much wiser than the poor Nun, carefully avoid looking straight at facts concerning which they do not wish to be set right. St. Thomas’ kind of faith which dares to look and see, and, if it may be to touch, is a much more real faith after all than that which will not venture to open its eyes.
Landing at Alexandria (after being blown off the Egyptian coast nearly as far as Crete) was an epoch in my life. No book, no gallery of pictures, can ever be more interesting or instructive than the first drive through an Eastern city; even such a hybrid one as Alexandria. But all the world knows this now, and I need not dwell on so familiar a topic. The only matter I care to record here is a visit I paid to a subterranean church which had just been opened, and of which I was fortunate enough to hear at the moment. I have never been able to learn anything further concerning it than appears in the following extract from one of my note-books, and I fear the church must long ago have been destroyed, and the frescoes, of course, effaced:
“In certain excavations now making in one of the hills of the Old City—within a few hundred yards of the Mahmoudié Canal—the workmen have come upon a small subterranean church; for whose very high antiquity many arguments may be adduced. The frescoes with which it is adorned are still in tolerable preservation, and appear to belong to the same period of art as those rescued from Pompeii. Though altogether inferior to the better specimens in the Museo Borbonico, there is yet the same simplicity of attitude and drapery; the same breadth of outline and effect produced by few touches. It is impossible to confound them for a moment with the stiff and meretricious style of Byzantine painting.
“The form of the church is very peculiar, and I conceive antique. If we suppose a shaft to have been cut into the hill, its base may be considered to form the centre of a cross. To the west, in lieu of nave, are two staircases; one ascending, the other descending to various parts of the hillside. To the east is a small chancel, with depressed elliptical arch and recesses at the back and sides, of the same form. The north transept is a mere apse, supported by rather elegant Ionic pilasters, and having a fan-shaped roof. Opposite this, and in the place of a south transept, is the largest apartment of the whole grotto: a chamber, presenting a singular transition between a modern funeral-vault and an ancient columbarium. The walls are pierced on all sides by deep holes, of the size and shape of coffins placed endwise. There are in all thirty-two of these holes; in which, however, I could find no evidence that they had ever been applied to the purpose of interment. In the corner, between this chamber and the chancel-arch, there is a deep stone cistern sunk in the ground; I presume a font. The frescoes at the end of the chancel are small, and much effaced. In the eastern apse there is a group representing the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. In the front walls of the chancel-arch are two life-size figures; one representing an angel, the other having the name of Christ inscribed over it in Greek letters. This last struck me as peculiarly interesting; from the circumstance that the face bears no resemblance whatever to the one conventionally received among us, in modern times. The eyes, in the Alexandrian fresco, are dark and widely opened; the eyebrows straight and strongly marked; the hair nearly black and gathered in short, thick masses over the ears. I was the more attracted by these peculiarities, as my attention had shortly before been arrested very forcibly by the splendid bronze bust from Herculaneum, in the Museo Borbonico. This grand and beautiful head, which Murray calls ‘Speucippus’ and the custodi, ‘Plato in the character of the Indian Bacchus,’ resembles so perfectly the common representations of Christ, that I should be at a loss to define any difference, unless it be that it has, perhaps, more intellectual power than our paintings and sculptures usually convey, and a more massive neck. If this Alexandrian fresco really represent the tradition of the 3rd or 4th century, it becomes a question of some curiosity: whence do we derive our modern idea of Christ’s face?”
Cairo was a great delight to me. I could not afford to stop at Shepheard’s Hotel but took up my abode with some kind Americans I had met in the steamer, in a sort of Pension kept by an Italian named Ronch; in old Cairo, actually on the bank of the Nile; so literally so, that I might have dropped a stone from our balcony into the river, just opposite the Isle of Rhoda. From this place I made two excursions to the Pyramids and had a somewhat appalling experience in the “King’s Chamber” in the vault of Cheops. I had gone rather recklessly to Ghiza without either friend or Dragoman; and allowed the wretched Scheik at the door to send five Arabs into the pyramid with me as guides. They had only two miserable dip candles altogether, and the darkness, dust, heat and noise of the Arabs chanting “Vera goot lady! Backsheeh! Backsheeh! Vera goot lady,” and so on da capo, all in the narrow, steeply-slanting passages, together with the intolerable sense of weight as of a mountain of stone over me, proved trying to my nerves. Then, when we had reached the central vault and I had glanced at the empty sarcophagus, which is all it contains, the five men suddenly stopped their chanting, placed themselves with their backs to the wall in rows, with crossed arms in the attitude of the Osiride pilasters; and one of them in a businesslike tone, demanded: “Backsheesh”! I instantly perceived into what a trap I had fallen, and what a fool I had been to come there alone. The idea that they might march out and leave me alone in that awful place, in the darkness, very nearly made me quail. But I knew it was no time to betray alarm, so I replied that I “Intended to pay them outside, but if they wished it I would do so at once.” I took out my purse and gave them three shillings to be divided between the five. They took the money and then returned to their posture against the wall.
“We want Backsheesh!”
I took my courage à deux mains, and said, “If you give me any more trouble the English Consul shall hear of it, and you will get the stick.”
“We want Backsheesh!”
“I’ll have no more of this,” I cried in a very sharp voice, and, turning to the ringleader, who held a candle, I said, “Here, you fellow! Take that candle on in front and let me out. Go!” He went!—and I blessed my stars, and all the stars, when I emerged out of that endless passage at last, and stood safe under the bright Egyptian sun.
I am glad to remember Ghiza as it was in those days before hotels, or even tents, were visible near it; when the solemn Sphinx,—so strangely and affectingly human! stood gazing over the desert sands, and beside it were only the ancient temple, the rifled tombs, and the three great Pyramids. To me in those days it seemed the most impressive Field of Death in the world.
The old Arab Mosques in Cairo also delighted me greatly both for their beauty and as studies of the original early English architecture. Needless to say I was enchanted with the streets and bazaars, and all the dim, strange, lovely pictures they afforded, and the Eastern odours which pervaded them in that bright, light air, wherein my chest grew sound and strong after having been for years oppressed with bronchial troubles. One day in my plenitude of enjoyment of health and vigour, I walked alone a long way down the splendid Shoubra avenue of Acacia Lebbex trees with the moving crowd of Arab men and women in all their varied costumes, and trains of camels and asses laden with green trefoil, glittering in the alternate sun and shade with never a cart or carriage to disturb the even currents to and fro. At last I came in sight of the Nile, and in the extreme excitement of the view, hastily concluded that the yellow bank which sloped down beyond the grass must be sand, and that I could actually plunge my hands in the River of Egypt. I ran down the slope some little distance from the avenue, and took a few steps on the supposed yellow sand. It proved to be merely mud, like the banks of the Avon at low tide at Clifton, though of different colour, and in a moment I felt myself sinking indefinitely. Already it was nearly up to my knees, and in a few minutes I should have been (quietly and unperceived by anybody) entombed for the investigation of Egyptologers of future generations. It was a ludicrous position, and even in the peril of it I believe I laughed outright. Any way I happily remembered that I had read years before in a bad French novel, how people saved themselves in quicksands in the Landes by throwing themselves down and so dividing their weight over a much larger surface than the soles of the feet. Instantly I turned back towards the bank, and cast myself along forward, and then by dint of enormous efforts withdrew my feet and struggled back to terra firma, much, I should think, after the mode of locomotion of an Ichthyosaurus or other “dragon of the prime.” Arrived at a place of safety I had next to reflect how I was to walk home into the town in the pickle to which I had reduced myself! Luckily the hot sun of Egypt dried the mud on my homely clothes and enabled me to brush it off as dust in an incredibly quick time. Before it had done so, however, a frog of exceptional ugliness mistook me for part of the bank and jumped on my lap. He looked such an ill-made creature that I constructed at once the (non-scientific) hypothesis that he must have been descended from some of the frogs which Pharaoh’s magicians are said to have made in rivalry to Moses; forerunners of those modern pathologists who are just clever enough to give us all sorts of Plagues, but always stop short of curing them.
I was very anxious, of course, to ascend the Nile to Philæ, or at the very least to Thebes; but I was too poor by far to hire a dahabieh for myself alone, and, in those days, excursion steamers were non-existent, or very rare. I did hear of a gentleman who wanted to make up a party and take a boat, but he coolly proposed that I should pay half of the expenses of five people, and I did not view that arrangement in a favourable light. Eventually I turned sorrowfully and disappointed back to Alexandria with a pleasant party of English and American ladies and gentlemen; and after a short passage to Jaffa, we rode up all together in two days to Jerusalem. I had given up riding many years before and taken to driving instead, but there was infinite exhilaration on finding myself again on horseback, on one of the active little, half Arab, Syrian steeds. That wonderful ride through the Jaffa orange groves and the Plain of Sharon with all its flowers, to Lydda and Ramleh, and then, next day, to Jerusalem, was beyond all words interesting. I think no one who has been brought up as we English are, on the double literature of Palestine and England, can visit the Holy Land with other than almost breathless curiosity mingled with a thousand tender associations. What England is to a cultivated American traveller of Washington Irving’s or Lowell’s stamp, that is Palestine to us all. As for me, my religious views made it, I think, rather more than less congenial and interesting to me than to many others. I find I wrote of it to my friend from Jerusalem (March 6th, 1858):
“I feel very happy to be here. The land seems worthy to be that in which from earliest history the human soul has highest and oftenest soared up to God. One wants no miraculous story to make such a country a ‘Holy Land;’ nor can such story make it less holy to me, as it does, I think, to some who equally disbelieve it. It seems to me as if Christians must be, and in fact are, overwhelmed and confounded to find themselves in the scene of such events. To me it is all pleasure. I believe that if Christ can see us now like other departed spirits, it is those who revere him as I do, and not those who give to him his Father’s place, whom he can regard most complacently. If I did not feel this it would pain me to be here.”
When I went first into the church of the Holy Sepulchre it happened, on account of some function going on elsewhere, to be unusually free from the crowds of pilgrims. It seemed to me to be a real parable in stone. All the different churches, Greek, Latin, Armenian Maronite, opened into the central Temple; as if to show that every creed has a Door leading to the true Holy Place.
I loved also the little narrow marble shrine in the midst with its small, low door, and the mere plain altar-tomb, with room to kneel beside it and pray,—if we will,—to him who is believed to have rested there for the mystic three days after his crucifixion; or if we will (and as I did), to “his Father and our Father”; in a spot hallowed by the associations of a hundred worshipping generations, and the memory of the holiest of men.
Another day I was able to walk alone nearly all round outside the walls of Jerusalem, beginning at the Jaffa gate and passing round through what was then a desert, but is now, I am told, a populous suburb. I came successively to Siloam and to the Valley of Hinnom, and of Jehoshaphat; to the Tombs of the Prophets, and at last to Gethsemane. At the time of my visit, this sacred spot, containing the ruins of an “oil press” (whence its supposed identification), was a small walled garden kept by monks who did their best to spoil its associations. Above it I sat for a long time beside the path up to St. Stephen’s Gate, where tradition places the scene of the great first Christian Martyrdom. The ground is all strewed still, with large stones and boulders, making it easy to conjure up the terrific picture of the kneeling saint and savage crowd, and of Saul standing by watching the scene.
Leaving Jerusalem after a week with the same pleasant English and American companions, and with a due provision of guards and tents and baggage mules, I rode to Bethlehem and Hebron, visiting on the way Abraham’s oak at Mamre, which is a magnificent old terebinth, and the vineyard of Esh-kol, then in a very poor condition of culture. We stopped the first night close to Solomon’s Pools, and I was profane enough to bring my sponges at earliest dawn into Jacob’s Well at the head of the waters, and enjoy a delicious bath. Ere we turned in on the previous evening, a clergyman of our party read to us, sitting under the walls of the old Saracenic castle, the pages in Stanley’s Palestine which describe, with all his vivid truthfulness and historic sentiment, the scene which lay before us; the three great ponds, “built by Solomon, repaired by Pontius Pilate,” which have supplied Jerusalem with water for 3,000 years.
I am much surprised that the problem offered by the contents of the vault beneath the Mosque of Hebron has not long ago excited the intensest curiosity among both Jews and Christians. Here, within small and definite limits, must lie evidence of incalculable weight in favour of or against the veracity of the Mosaic record. If the account in Gen. L. be correct, the bones of Jacob were brought out of Egypt and deposited here by Joseph; embalmed in the finest and most durable manner. We are expressly told (Gen. L., 2 and 3) that Joseph ordered the physicians to embalm his father, that “forty days were fulfilled for him, for so are fulfilled the days of those which are embalmed;” and that Joseph went up to Canaan with “all the servants of Pharaoh and the elders of his house, and all the elders of the land of Egypt,” (a rather amazing exodus!) and “chariots and horsemen, a very great company.” They finally buried Jacob (v. 13) “in the Cave of the field of Machpelah which Abraham bought.” It was unquestionably, then, a first-class Mummy, covered with wrappers and inscriptions, and enclosed, of course, in a splendidly-painted Mummy-coffin, which was deposited in that unique cave; and the extraordinary sanctity which has attached to the spot as far as tradition reaches back, affords presumption amounting almost to guarantee that there, if anywhere, below the six cenotaphs in the upper chamber, in the vault under the small hole in the floor where the Prince of Wales and Dean Stanley were privileged to look down into the darkness,—lie the relics which would terminate more controversies, and throw more light on the origin of Judaism than can be done by all the Rabbis and Bishops of Europe and Asia together! Why do not the Rothschilds and Hirschs and Montefiores and Goldschmidts put together a modest little subscription of a million or two and buy up Hebron, and so settle once for all whether the Jewish Ulysses were a myth or a man; and whether there were really an Israel of whom they are the “Children?” I have talked to Dean Stanley on the subject, who (as he tells us in his delightful Jewish Church, I., 500) shared all my curiosity, but when I urged the query: “Did he think that the relics of the Patriarchs would be found, if we could examine the cave?” he put up his hands in a deprecating attitude, which all who knew and loved him will remember, and said, “Ah! that is the question, indeed!”
Is it possible that the millionaire Jews of Germany, France and England are, after all, like my poor friends the Nuns, who would not get up at sunrise on Trinity Sunday to see “toutes les trois personnes de la sainte Trinité,”—and that they prefer to believe that the bones of the three Patriarchs are where they ought to be, but would rather not put that confidence to the test?
One of the sights which affected me most in the course of our pilgrimage through Judæa was beheld after a night spent by the ladies of our party in our tent pitched among the sands (and centipedes!) of the desert of the Mar Saba. (Our gentlemen-friends were privileged to sleep in the vast old monastery whence they brought us next morning the most excellent raki.) As we rode out of the little valley of our encampment and down by the convent of Mar Saba, we obtained a complete view of the whole hermit burrow; for such it may properly be considered. Mar Saba is the very ideal of a desert. It lies amid the wilderness of hills, not grand enough to be sublime but only monotonous and hopelessly barren. So white are these hills that at first they appear to be of chalk, but further inspection shows them to be of whitish rock, with hardly a trace of vegetation growing anywhere over it. On the hills there is sometimes an inch of soil over the rock; in the valleys there are torrents of stones over the inch of soil. Between our mid-day halt at Derbinerbeit (the highest land in Judæa), and the evening rest at Mar Saba, our whole march had been in utter solitude; not a village, a tent, a caravan, a human being in sight. Not a tree or bush. Of living creatures hardly a bird to break the dead silence of the world, only a large and venomous snake crawling beside our track. Thus, far from human haunts, in the heart of the wilderness, lies Mar Saba. Fit approach to such a shrine! Through the arid, burning rocks a profound and sharply-cut chasm suddenly opens and winds, forming a hideous valley, such as may exist in the unpeopled moon, but which probably has not its equal in our world for rugged and blasted desolation. There is no brook or stream in the depths of the ravine. If a torrent may ever rush down it after the thunderstorms with which the country is often visited, no traces of water remain even in early spring. Barren, burning, glaring rocks alone are to be seen on every side. Far up on the cliff, like a fortress, stand the gloomy, windowless walls of the convent; but along the ravine in an almost inaccessible gorge of the hills, are caves and holes half-way down the precipice,—the dwellings of the hermits. Here, in a den fit for a fox or a hyæna, one poor soul had died just before my visit, after five-and-forty years of self-incarceration. Death had released him, but many more remained; and we could see some of them from the distant road as we passed, sitting at the mouth of their caverns, or walking on the little ledges of rock which they had smoothed for terraces. Their food (such as it is) is sent from the convent and let down from the cliffs at needful intervals. Otherwise they live absolutely alone,—alone in this hideous desolation of nature, with the lurid, blasted desert for their sole share in God’s beautiful universe. We are all, I suppose, accustomed to think of a hermit as our poets have painted him, dwelling serene in
“A lodge in some vast wilderness,
Some boundless continuity of shade,”
undisturbed by all the ugly and jarring sights and sounds of our grinding civilization; sleeping calmly on his bed of fern, feeding on his pulse and cresses, and drinking the water from the brook.
“He kneels at morn at noon and eve,
He hath a cushion plump,
It is the moss that wholly hides
The rotted old oak stump.”
But the hermits of Mar Saba, how different are they from him who assoiled the Ancient Mariner? No holy cloisters of the woods, and sound of chanting brooks, and hymns of morning birds; only this silent, burning waste, this “desolation deified.” It seemed as if some frightful aberration of the religious sentiment could alone lead men to choose for home, temple, prison, tomb, the one spot of earth where no flower springs to tell of God’s tenderness, no soft dew or sweet sound ever falls to preach faith and love.
There are many such hermits still in the Greek Church. I have seen their eyries perched where only vultures should have their nests, on the cliffs of Caramania, and among the caverns of the Cyclades. Anthony and Stylites have indeed left behind them a track of evil glory, along which many a poor wretch still “crawls to heaven along the devil’s trail.” Are not lives wasted like these to be put into the account when we come to estimate the Gesta Christi? Must we not, looking on these and on the ten thousand, thousand hearts broken in monasteries and nunneries all over Europe, admit that historical Christianity has not only done good work in the world, but bad work also: and that, diverging widely from the Spirit of Christ, it has been far from uniformly beneficent?
It was while riding some hours from Mar Saba through the low hills before coming out on the blighted flats of the Dead Sea, that one of those pictures passed before me which are ever after hung up in the mind’s gallery among the choicest of the spoils of Eastern travel. By some chance I was alone, riding a few hundred yards in front of the caravan, when, turning the corner of a hill, I met a man approaching me, the only one I had seen for several hours since we passed a few black tents eight or ten miles away. He was a noble-looking young shepherd, dressed in the camel’s-hair robe, and with the lithesome, powerful limbs and elastic step of the children of the desert. But the interest which attached to him was the errand on which he had manifestly been engaged on those Dead Sea plains from whence he was returning. Round his neck, and with its little limbs held gently by his hand, lay a lamb he had rescued and was doubtless carrying home. The little creature lay as if perfectly contented and happy, and the man looked pleased as he strode along lightly with his burden; and as I saluted him with the usual gesture of pointing to heart and head and the “salaam alik!”, (Peace be with you), he responded with a smile and a kindly glance at the lamb, to which he saw my eyes were directed. It was actually the beautiful parable of the gospel acted out before my sight. Every particular was true to the story; the shepherd had doubtless left his “ninety-and-nine in the wilderness,” round the black tents we had seen so far away, and had sought for the lost lamb “till he found it,” where it must quickly have perished without his help, among those blighted plains. Literally, too, “when he had found it, he laid it on his shoulders, rejoicing.”
After this beautiful sight which I have longed ever since for a painter’s power to place on canvas (a better subject a thousand-fold than the cruel “Scape-Goat”), we reached the Dead Sea, and I managed to dip into it, after wading out a very long way in the shallow, bitter, biting water which stung my lips and nostrils, and tasted like a horrible mixture of quinine and salt. From the shore, all strewed with the white skeletons of trees washed down by the river, we made our way (mostly galloping) in four hours to the Ford of Jordan; and there I had the privilege of another dip, or rather of seven dips, taken in commemoration of Naaman and to wash off the Dead Sea brine! It is the spot supposed to have witnessed the transit of Joshua and the baptisms of St. John. The following night our tents were pitched among the ruins of Jericho. The wonder is, not that the once flourishing city should be deserted and Herod’s great amphitheatre there a ruinous heap, but that a town was ever built in such an insanitary place. Closed in by the mountains on every side from whence a fresh breeze could blow upon it, and open only to the unwholesome flats of the Dead Sea, the situation is pestilential.
Next day we rode back to Jerusalem through the desolate mountains of the Quarantania, where tradition places the mystic Fast and Temptation of Christ; a dreary, lonely, burning desert. Here, also, is the supposed scene of the parable of the Good Samaritan, and the ruins of a great building, which may have been a Half-way House Inn beside the road, bear out the tradition. I have often reflected that orthodox divines miss half the point of that beautiful story when they omit to mark the fact that the Samaritans were, in Christ’s time, boycotted by the Jews as heretics; and that it was precisely one of these heretics who was made by Jesus the type for all time of genuine philanthropy,—in direct and purposeful contrast to the representatives of Judaic orthodoxy, the Priest and Levite.
The sun on my head during the latter hours of the ride became intolerable; not like English heat, however excessive, but roasting my very brains through all the folds of linen on my hat and of a damp handkerchief within. It was like sitting before a kitchen fire with one’s head in the position proper for a leg of mutton! I felt it was a matter of life and death to escape, and galloped on by myself in advance for many miles till suddenly I came, just under Bethany at the base of the Mount of Olives, to a magnificent ancient fountain, with the cool water gushing out, amid the massive old masonry. In a moment I leaped from my equally eager horse, threw off my hat and bared my neck and put my head under the blessed stream. Of course it was a perilous proceeding, but it saved me from a sunstroke.
That evening in Jerusalem I wished good-bye to my pleasant fellow-travellers, who were good enough to pass a vote of thanks to me for my “unvarying pluck and hilarity during the fatigues and dangers of the way!” I started next day for the two days’ ride to Jaffa, accompanied only by a good Italian named Abengo, and a muleteer. There was a small war going on between some of the tribes on the way, and a certain chief named Aboo-Goosh (beneath whose robber’s castle I had been pelted with stones on my way up to Jerusalem) was scouring the country. We passed, in the valley of Ajalon, some wounded men borne home from a battle, but otherwise encountered nothing alarming, and I obtained a great deal of curious information from Abengo, who knew Palestine intimately, and whose wife was a Christian woman of Nazareth. There is no use in repeating now records of a state of things which has been modified, no doubt, essentially in thirty years.
From Jaffa I sailed to Beyrout, and there, with kind help and advice from the Consul, I obtained the services of an old Turk as a Dragoman, and he and I and a muleteer laden with my bed and baggage started to cross Lebanon and make our way to Baalbec and, as I hoped, also to Damascus. The snows were still thick on the higher slopes of Lebanon, and after the excessive heat I had just undergone in Syria, the cold was trying. But the beauty and grandeur of those noble mountains, fringed below with fig and olive, and with their snowy summits rising height beyond height above, was compensation for all hardship. By a curious chance, Lebanon was the first mountain range worthy of the name, which I had ever crossed. It was an introduction, of course, to a whole world of impressions and experiences.
I had a good many escapes in the course of my ride; there being nothing to be called a road over much of the way, and such path as there was being covered with snow or melting torrents. My strong little Syrian horse walked and scrambled and stumbled up beds of streams running down in cataracts over the rocks and boulders; and on one occasion he had to bear me down a very steep descent, where we floundered forward, sometimes up to his girths in the snow, in dread of descending with irresistible impetus to the edge of a precipice which yawned at the bottom. We did reach the verge in rather a shaky condition; but the good beast struggled hard to save himself, and turned at the critical moment safe along the edge.
A sad association belongs to my sojourn among the Maronites at Zachly; a large village on the further side of Lebanon, on the slopes of the Haraun. I slept there on my outward way in my tent pitched in an angle of grass outside one of the first houses, and on my return journey I obtained the use of the principal room of the same house from my kind hosts, as the cold outside was too considerable for tent life in comfort. Zachly was a very humble, simple place. The houses were all of mud, with flat roofs made of branches laid across and covered with more mud. A stem of a living tree usually stood in the middle of the house supporting the whole erection, which was divided into two or three chambers. A recess in the wall held piles of mats, and of the hard cushions made of raw cotton, which form both seats, beds, and pillows. The rough, unplaned door, with wooden lock, the window half stuffed up, the abundant population of cocks and hens, cats and dogs and rosy little boys and girls, strongly reminded me of Balisk! I was welcomed most kindly after a brief negotiation with Hassan; and the simple women and girls clustered round me with soft words and presents of carrots and daffodils. One old woman having kissed my hands as a beginning, proceeded to put her arms round my neck and embrace me in a most motherly way. To amuse the party, I showed them my travelling bag, luncheon and writing and drawing apparatus, and made them taste my biscuits and smell my toilet vinegar. Screams of “Taib, Taib! Katiyeh!” (good, very good) rewarded my small efforts, and then I made them tell me all their names, which I wrote in my note-book. They were very pretty: Helena, Mareen, Yasmeen, Myrrhi, Maroon, Georgi, Malachee, Yussef, and several others, the last being Salieh, the young village priest, a tall, grand-looking young man with high cylindrical black hat, black robe and flowing brown hair. I made him a respectful salutation at which he seemed pleased. On my second visit to Zachly I attended the vesper service in his little chapel as the sun went down over Lebanon. It was a plain quadrangle of mud walls, brown without and whitewashed within; a flat roof of branches and mortar; a post for support in the centre; a confessional at one side; a little lectern; an altar without crucifix and only decorated by two candlesticks; a jar of fresh daffodils; some poor prints; a blue tea-cup for sacramental plate, and a little cottage-window into which the setting sun was shining softly;—such was the chapel of Zachly. A few men knelt to the left, a few women to the right; in front of the altar was a group of children, also kneeling, and waiting to take their part in the service. At the lectern stood the noble figure of young Papas Salieh, leaning on one of the crutches which in all Eastern churches are provided to relieve the fatigue of the attendants, who, like Abraham, “worship, leaning on the top of a staff.” Beside the Papas stood a ragged but intelligent little acolyte, who chanted very well, and on the other side of the lectern an aged peasant, who also took his part. The prayers were, of course, unintelligible to me, being in Arabic; but I recognised in the Gospel the chapter of genealogies in Luke, over whose hard names the priest helped his friend quite unaffectedly. The reading over, Papas Salieh took off his black and red cap, and, kneeling before the altar, commenced another chanted prayer, while the women beside me bowed till they kissed the ground in Eastern prostration, beating their breasts with resounding blows. The group of children made the responses at intervals; and then the priest blessed us, and the simple service was over, having occupied about twenty minutes. While we were departing, the Papas seated himself in the confessional and a man went immediately into the penitents’ place beside him. There was something very affecting to me in this poor little church of clay, with its humble efforts at cleanliness and flowers and music; all built and adorned by the worshippers’ own hands, and served by the young peasant priest, doubtless the son and brother of some of his own flock.
As I have said there are sad associations connected with this visit of mine to Zachly. A very short time afterwards the Druses came down with irresistible force,—massacred the greater number of the unhappy Maronites and burned the village. The spot where I had been so kindly received was left a heap of blackened ruins, and what became of sweet, motherly Helena and her dear little children and good Papas Salieh and the rest, I have never been able to learn.
It took six hours of hard riding in a bitter wind to carry me from Zachly to Baalbec; but anticipation bore me on wings, and to beguile the way I repeated to myself as my good memory permitted, the whole of Moore’s poem of Paradise and the Peri, culminating in the scene which the Peri beheld “When o’er the vale of Baalbec winging.” In vain, however, I cross-questioned Hassan (we talked Italian tant bien que mal) about Peris. He had never heard of such beings. But of Djinns in general he knew only too much; and notably that they had built the vast ruins of Baalbec, which no mortal hands could have raised; and that to the present time they haunt them so constantly and in such terrific shape, that it is very perilous for anybody to go there alone and quite impossible to do so after nightfall. I had reason to bless this belief in the Djinns of Baalbec for it left me the undisturbed solitary enjoyment of the mighty enclosure within the Saracenic walls for the best part of two days, unvexed by the inquisitive presence or observation of the population of the Arab village outside.
To pitch my tent among the ruins, however, was more than I could bring Hassan to do by any cajoling, and I consented finally to sleep in a small cabin consisting of a single chamber of which I could lock the door inside. When I prepared for sleep on the hard cotton cushions laid over a stone bench, and with the two unglazed windows admitting volumes of cold air, I was frightened to find I had every symptom of approaching fever. Into what an awful position,—I reflected,—had I put myself, with no one but that old Turk Hassan, and the Arab from whom I had hired this little house for the night, to take care of me should I have a real bad fever, and be kept there between life and death for weeks! Reflecting what I could possibly do to avert the danger, brought on, of course, by cold and fatigue, I took from my bag the half-bottle of Raki (a very pure spirit made from rice) which my travelling friends had brought from the monastery at Mar Saba and had kindly shared with me; and to a large dose of this I was able to add some hot water from a sort of coffee-pot left, by good luck, in the yet warm brazier of charcoal in the middle of my room. I drank my Raki-toddy to the last drop, and then slept the sleep of the just,—to awaken quite well the next morning! And if any of my teetotal friends think I did wrong to take it, I beg entirely to differ from them on the subject.
The days which I spent in and around Baalbec were more than repayment for the fatigues and perils of the passage of “Sainted Lebanon;” whose famous Cedars, by the way, I was unable to visit; the region where they stand being at that season too deeply covered with snow. Here is a description I gave of Baalbec to Harriet St. Leger just after my visit:—
“I had two wonderful days indeed in Baalbec. The number of the vast solitary ruins exceeded all my anticipations, and their grandeur impresses one as no remains less completely isolated can do. Imagine a space about that of Newbridge garden surrounded by enormous Saracenic walls with a sweet, bright brook running round it, and then left to entire solitude. A few cattle browse on the short grass, and now and then, I suppose, some one enters by one or other of the different gaps in the wall to look after them; but in the Temple of Jupiter, shut in by its great walls, to which the displacement of a single stone makes now the sole entrance, no one ever enters. The fear of Djinns renders the place even doubly alarming! Among the most awful things in Baalbec are stupendous subterranean tunnels running in various directions under the ruined city. I groped through several of them, they opened out with great doorways into others which, having no light, I would not explore, but which seemed abysses of awe! The stones of all these works are enormous. Those 5 or 6 feet and 12 or 15 feet long are among the smallest. In the temple were some which I could not span with five extensions of my arms, i.e., something like 30 feet, but there are still larger elsewhere among the ruins.”
The shafts of the columns of the two Temples,—the six left standing of the great Temple of the Sun which
“Stand sublime
Casting their shadows from on high
Like Dials which the wizard Time
Had raised to count his ages by”—
and those of the hypæthral temple of Zeus of which only a few have fallen, are alike miracles of size and perfection of moulding. The fragments of palaces reveal magnificence unparalleled. All these enormous edifices are wrought with such lavish luxuriance of imagination, such perfection of detail in harmony with the luscious Corinthian style which pervades the whole, that the idea of the Arabs that they are the work not of men but of Genii, seemed quite natural. I recalled what Vitruvius (who wrote about the time in which the best of these temples was erected), says of the methods by which, in his day, the largest stones were moved from quarries and lifted to their places, but I failed to comprehend how the colossal work was achieved here.
Passing out of the great ruined gateway I came to vast square and hexagonal courts with walls forming exedræ, loaded with profusion of ornaments; columns, entablatures, niches and seats overhung with carvings of garlands of flowers and the wings of fanciful creatures. Streets, gateways and palaces, hardly distinguishable in their ruin, follow on beyond the courts and portico. I climbed up a shattered stair to the summit of the Saracenic wall and felt a sort of shock to behold the living world below me; the glittering brook, the almond trees in blossom and Anti-Lebanon beyond. Here I caught sight of the well-known exquisite little circular temple with its colonnade of six Corinthian columns, of which the architraves are recurved inwards from column to column. If I am not mistaken a reproduction of this lovely little building was set up in Kew Gardens in the last century.
Last of all I returned to the Temple of Zeus—or of Baal as it is sometimes called—to spend there in secure solitude (except for Djinns!) the closing hours of that long, rich day. The large walls are almost perfect; the colonnades of enormous pillars are mostly still standing. From the inner portal with its magnificent lintel half fallen from its place, the view is probably the finest of any fane of the ancient world, and was to me impressive beyond description. Even the spot where the statue of the god has stood can easily be traced. A great stone lying overturned on the pavement was doubtless the pedestal. I remained for hours in this temple; sometimes feebly trying to sketch what I saw, sometimes lost in ponderings on the faiths and worships of the past and present. A hawk, which probably had never before found a human visitor at eventide in that weird place, came swooping over me; then gave a wild shriek and flew away. A little later the moon rose over the walls. The calm and silence and beauty of that scene can never be forgotten.
I was unable to pursue my journey to Damascus as I had designed. The muleteer, with all my baggage, contrived to miss us on the road among the hills in Anti-Lebanon; and, eventually, after another visit to the ruins and to the quarries from whence the vast stones were taken, I rode back to Zachly and thence (a two days’ ride) over Lebanon to Beyrout.
I remained a few days at the hotel which then existed a mile from the town, while I waited for the steamer to take me to Athens, and much enjoyed the lovely scene of rich mulberry and almond gardens beside the shell-strewn strand, with snowy Lebanon behind, towering over the fir-woods into the deep blue sky. The Syrian peasant women are sweet, courteous creatures. One day as I sat under a cactus-hedge reading Shelley, a pretty young mother came by, and after interchanging a “Peace be with you,” proceeded unhesitatingly, and without a word of explanation, to deposit her baby,—Mustapha by name,—in my lap. I was very willing to nurse Mustapha, and we made friends at once as easily as his mother had done; and my heart was the better for the encounter!
After I had paid off Hassan and settled my account at the hotel, I found my financial condition exceedingly bad! I had just enough cash remaining to carry me (omitting a few meals) by second-class passage to Athens: which was the nearest place where I had opened a credit from my bankers, or where I had any introductions. There was nothing for it but to take a second-class place on board the Austrian Lloyd’s steamer L’Impératrice; though it was not a pleasant arrangement, seeing that there was no other woman passenger and no stewardess on the ship at all. Nevertheless this was just one of the cases in which knocking about the world brought me favourable experience of human nature. The Captain of the Impératrice, an Italian gentleman, did his utmost, with extreme delicacy and good taste, to make my position comfortable. He ordered his own dinner to be served in the second cabin that he might preside at the table instead of one of his subordinates; and during the day he came often to see that I was well placed and shaded on deck, and to interchange a little pleasant talk, without intrusion.
It is truly one of the silliest of the many silly things in the education of women that we are taught little or nothing about the simplest matters of banking and stock-and-share buying and selling. I, who had always had money in abundance given me straight into my hand, knew absolutely nothing, when my father’s death left me to arrange my affairs, how such business is done, how shares are bought and sold, how credits are open at corresponding bankers; how, even, to draw a cheque! It all seemed to me a most perilous matter, and I feared that I might, in those remote regions, come to grief any day by the refusal of some local banker to honour my cheques or by the neglect of my London bankers to bespeak credit for me. My means were so narrow, and I had so little experience of the expenses of living and travelling, that I was greatly exercised as to my small concerns. I brought with me (generally tied by a string round my neck and concealed) a very valuable diamond ring to sell in case I came to real disaster; but it had been constantly worn by my mother; and I felt at Beyrout that, sooner than sell it, I would live on short commons for much more than a week!
One day of our voyage I spent at Cyprus where I admired the ancient church of San Lazzaro, half mosque, half church, and said to be the final grave of Lazarus. I had visited his, supposed, temporary one in Bethany. Another day I landed at Rhodes and was able to see the ruined street which bears over each house the arms of the Knight to whom it belonged. At the upper end of the way are still visible the arch and shattered relics of their church. Writing to Miss St. Leger March 28th, I described my environment thus:
“Dearest Harriet,
“Behold me seated à la Turque close to a party of Moslem gentlemen who alternately smoke and say their prayers all day long. We are steaming up through the lovely “Isles of Greece,” having left Rhodes this morning and Cos an hour ago. As we pass each wild cape and green shore I take up a certain opera glass with ‘H. S.’ on the top of the box, and wish very much I could see through it the dear, kind eyes that used it once. They would be pleasanter to see than all these scenes, glorious as they are. The sun is going down into the calm blue sea and throwing purple lights already on the countless islands through which the vessel winds its way. White sea-gulls follow us and beautiful little quaint-sailed boats appear every now and then round the islands. The peculiar beauty of this famous passage is derived, however, from the bold and varied outline of the islands and adjoining coast of Asia Minor. From little rocks not larger than the ship itself, up to large provinces with extensive towns like Cos, there is an endless variety and boldness of form. Ireland’s Eye magnified to twice the height, is, I should say, the commonest type. In some almost inaccessible cliffs one sees hermitages; in others convents. I shall post this at Smyrna.”
As the Impératrice stopped two or three days in the magnificent harbour of Smyrna, I had good opportunity to land and make my way to the scene of Polycarp’s Martyrdom amid the colossal cypresses which outdo all those of Italy except the quincentenarians in the Giusti garden in Verona. It was Easter, and a ridiculous incident occurred on the Saturday. I was busy writing in the cabin of the Impératrice at mid-day, when, subito! there were explosions in our vessel and in a hundred other vessels in the harbour, again and again and again, as if a battle of Trafalgar were going on all round! I rushed on deck and found the steward standing calm and cheerful amid the terrific noise and smoke, “For God’s sake what has happened?” I cried breathless. “Nothing, Signora, nothing! It is the Royal Salute all the ships are firing, of 21 guns.”
“In honour of whom?” I asked, somewhat less alarmed.
“Iddio, Signora! Gesù Cristo, sicuro! È il momento della Resurrezione, si sà.”
“O, no!” I said, “Not on Saturday. It was on Sunday, you know!”
“Che, che! Dicono forse cosi i Protestanti! Sappiamo noi altri, che era il Sabato.”
I never got to the bottom of this mystery, but can testify that at Smyrna in 1858 there were many scores of these Royal Salutes (!) on Holy Saturday at noon in honour of the Resurrection.
It was one of the brightest hours of my happy life, that on which I stood on the deck of our ship at sunrise and passed under “Sunium’s marble steep” and knew that I was approaching Athens. As we steamed up the gulf, the red clouds flamed over Parnes and Hymettus and lighted up the hills of Peloponnesus. The bright blue waves were dancing under our prow, and I could see over them far away the “rocky brow which looks o’er sea-born Salamis,” where Xerxes sat on his silver-footed throne on such a morn as this. Above, to our right, over the olive woods with the rising sun behind it, like a crowned hill was the Acropolis of Athens and the Parthenon upon it.
Very soon I had landed at the Piræus and had engaged a carriage (there was no railway then) to take me to Athens. The drive was enchanting, between olive groves and vineyards, and with the Temple of Theseus and the buildings on the Acropolis coming into view as I approached Athens, till I was beside myself with delight and excitement. The first thing to do was to drive to the private house of the banker to whom I was recommended, to arouse the poor old gentleman (nothing loath apparently to do business even at seven o’clock) to draw fifty sovereigns, and then to go to the French Hotel, choose a room with a fine view of the Parthenon, and to say to the master: “Send me the very best déjeuner you can provide and a bottle of Samian wine, and let this letter be taken to Mr. Finlay.” That breakfast, with that view, was a feast of the gods after my many abstinencies, though I nearly “dashed down the cup of Samian wine,” not in patriotic despair for Greece, but because it was so abominably bad that no poetry could have been made out of it by Anacreon himself. Hardly had I finished my meal, when Mr. Finlay appeared at my door, having hurried with infinite kindness to welcome me, and do honour to the introduction of his cousin, my dear sister-in-law. “I put myself,” said he, “at your orders for the day. We will go wherever you please.”
It would be unfair to inflict on the reader a detailed account of all I saw at Athens under the admirable guidance of Mr. Finlay during a week of intensest enjoyment. Mr. Finlay (it can scarcely yet be forgotten) went out to Greece a few weeks or months before Byron and fought with him and after him, through the War of Independence. After this, having married a beautiful Armenian lady, he bought much land in Eubœa, built himself a handsome house in Athens and lived there for the rest of his life, writing his great History (in five volumes) of Greece under Foreign Domination; making a magnificent collection of coins; and acting for many years as the Times correspondent at Athens. He was not only a highly erudite archæologist, but an enthusiast for the land of his adoption and all its triumphs of art; in short, the best of all possible ciceroni. I was fortunately not wholly unprepared to profit by his learned expositions and delicate observation on the architecture of the glorious ruins, for I had made copies of prints of all at Athens and elsewhere in Greece with ground-plans and restorations and notes of everything I could learn about them, many years before when I was wont to amuse myself with drawing, while my mother read to me. I found that I knew beforehand nearly exactly what remained of the Parthenon and the Erechtheum and the Temple of Victory, the Propylæum on the Acropolis and the Theseium below; and it was of intensest interest to me to learn, under Mr. Finlay’s guidance, precisely where the Elgin Marbles had stood, and to note the extraordinary fact, on which he insisted much,—that there is not a single straight line in the whole Parthenon. Everything, down to single stones in the entablatures and friezes, is curved, in some cases, he felt assured, after they had been placed in situ. The extreme entasis of the columns and the great pyramidal inclination of the whole building, were most noticeable when attention was once drawn to them. As we approached the majestic ruins of Adrian’s Temple of Jupiter on the plains below, (that enormous temple which had double rows of columns surrounding it and quadruple rows in front and back, of ten columns each) I exclaimed “Why! there ought to be three columns standing at that far angle!” “Quite true,” said Mr. Finlay, “one of them fell just six weeks ago.”
Since this visit of mine to Athens a vast deal has been done to clear away the remains of the Turkish tower and other barbaric buildings which obstructed and desecrated the summit of the Acropolis; and the fortunate visitor may now see the whole Propylæum and all the spaces open and free, beside examining the very numerous statues and bas reliefs some quaintly archaic, some of the best age and splendidly beautiful, which have been dug out in recent years in Greece.
I envy every visitor to Athens now, but console myself by procuring photographs of all the finds from those excellent artists, Thomaïdes, Brothers.
Mr. Finlay spoke much of Byron in answer to my questions, and described him as a most singular combination of romance and astuteness. The Greeks imagined that a man capable of such enthusiasm as to go to war for their enfranchisement must have a rather soft head as well as warm heart; but they were much mistaken when they tried in their simplicity to exploiter him in matters of finance. There were self-devoted and disinterested patriots, but there were also (as was inevitable), among the insurgents many others who had a sharp eye to their own financial and political schemes Byron saw through these men (Mr. Finlay said), with astounding quickness, and never allowed them to guide or get the better of him in any negotiation. About money matters he considered he was inclined to be “close-fisted.” This was an opinion strongly confirmed to me some months later by Walter Savage Landor, who repeatedly remarked that Byron’s behaviour in several occurrences, while in Italy, was far from liberal and that, luxuriously as he chose to live, he was by no means ready to pay freely for his luxury. Shelley on the contrary, though he lived most simply and was always hard pressed for money by William Godwin (who Fanny Kemble delightfully described to me àpropos of Dowden’s Memoirs, as “one of those greatly gifted and greatly borrowing people!”), was punctilious to the last degree in paying his debts and even those of his friends. There was a story of a boat purchased by both Byron and Shelley which I cannot trust my memory to recall accurately as Mr. Landor told it to me, and which I do not exactly recognise in the Memoirs, but which certainly amounted to this,—that Byron left Shelley to pay for their joint purchase, and that Shelley did so, though at the time he was in extreme straits for money. All the impressions, I may here remark, which I gathered at that time in Greece and Italy (1858), where there were yet a few alive who personally knew both these great poets, was in favour of Shelley and against Byron. Talking over them many years afterwards with Mazzini I was startled by the vehemence with which he pronounced his preference for Byron, as the one who had tried to put his sympathy with a struggling nation into practice, and had died in the noble attempt. This was natural enough on the part of the Italian patriot; but I think the vanity and tendency to “pose,” which formed so large a part of Byron’s character had probably more to do with this last acted Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, than Mazzini, (who had no such foibles) was likely to understand. The following curious glimpse of Byron at Venice before he went to Greece, occurs in an autograph letter in my possession, by Mrs. Hemans to the late Miss Margaret Lloyd. It seems worth quoting here.
“Bronwylfa, 8th April, 1819.
“Your affection of Lord Byron will not be much increased by the description I am going to transcribe for you of his appearance and manners abroad. My sister, who is now at Venice, has sent me the following sketch of the Giaour:—‘We were presented at the Governor’s, after which we went to a conversazione at Madlle. Benzoni’s, where we saw Lord Byron; and now my curiosity is gratified, I have no wish ever to see him again. A more wretched, depraved-looking countenance it is impossible to imagine! His hair streaming almost down to his shoulders and his whole appearance slovenly and even dirty. Still there is a something which impels you to look at his face, although it inspires you with aversion, a something entirely different from any expression on any countenance I ever beheld before. His character, I hear, is worse than ever; dreadful it must be, since everyone says he is the most dissipated person in Italy, exceeding even the Italians themselves.’”
Shortly before my visit to Athens an article, or book, by Mr. Trelawney had been published in England, in which that writer asserted that Byron’s lame leg was a most portentous deformity, like the fleshless leg of a Satyr. I mentioned this to Mr. Finlay, who laughed, and said: “That reminds me of what Byron said of Trelawney; ‘If we could but make Trelawney wash his hands and speak the truth, we might make a gentleman of him!’ Of course,” continued Mr. Finlay, “I saw Byron’s legs scores of times, for we bathed together daily whenever we were near the sea or a river, and there was nothing wrong with the leg, only an ordinary and not very bad, club-foot.”
Among the interesting facts which Mr. Finlay gave me as the results of his historical researches in Greece was that a school of philosophy continued to be held in the Groves of the Academè (through which we were walking at the moment), for 900 years from the time of Plato. A fine collection of gold and silver coins which he had made, afforded, under his guidance, a sort of running commentary on the history of the Byzantine Empire. There were series of three and four reigns during which the coins became visibly worse and worse, till at last there was no silver in them at all, only base metal of some sort; and then, things having come to the worst, there was a revolution, a new dynasty, and a brand new and pure coinage.
The kindness of this very able man and of his charming wife was not limited to playing cicerone to me. Nothing could exceed their hospitality. The first day I dined at their house a party of agreeable and particularly fashionably dressed Greek ladies and gentlemen were assembled. As we waited for dinner the door opened and a magnificent figure appeared, whom I naturally took for, at least, an Albanian Chief, and prepared myself for an interesting presentation. He wore a short green velvet jacket covered with gold embroidery, a crimson sash, an enormous white muslin kilt (I afterwards learned it contained 60 yards of muslin, and that the washing thereof is a function of the highest responsibility), and leggings of green and gold to match the jacket. One moment this splendid vision stood six feet high in the doorway; the next he bowed profoundly and pronounced the consecrated formula:—
“Madame est servie!”
and we went to dinner, where he waited admirably.
Some year or two later, after I had published some records of my travels, and sent them to Mr. Finlay, I received from him the following letter:—
“Athens, 26th May.
“My dear Miss Cobbe,
“Baron von Schmidthals sent me your letter of the 18th April with the Cities of the Past yesterday; his baggage having been detained at Syria. This post brought me Fraser with a ‘Day at Athens’ with due regularity, and now accept my sincere thanks for both. I am ashamed of my neglect in not thanking you sooner for Fraser, but I did not know your address. I felt grateful for it, having been very, very often tired of ‘Days at Athens!’ It was a treat to meet so pleasant a ’day,’ and have another pleasant day recalled. Others to whom I lent Fraser, told me the ‘Day,’ was delightful. I had heard of your misfortune but I hoped you had entirely recovered, and I regret to hear that you use crutches still. I, too, am weak and can walk little, but my complaint is old age. The Saturday Review has told me that you have poured some valuable thoughts into the river that flows through ages.
‘Rè degli altri; superbo, altero fiume!’
Solomon tried to couch its cataracts in vain. If you lived at Athens you would hardly believe that man can grow wiser by being made to think. It only makes him more wicked here in Greece. But the river of thought must be intended to fertilize the future.
“I wish I could send you some news that would interest or amuse you, but you may recollect that I live like a hermit and come into contact with society chiefly in the matter of politics which I cannot expect to render interesting to you and which is anything but an amusing subject to me; I being one of the Greek landlords on whose head Kings and National Assemblies practise the art of shaving. Our revolution has done some good by clearing away old abuses, but the positive gain has been small. England sent us a boy-king, and Denmark with him a Count Sponneck, whom the Greeks, not inaccurately, call his ‘alter NEMO.’ Still, though we are all very much dissatisfied, I fancy sometimes that fate has served Greece better than England, Denmark, or the National Assembly. The evils of this country were augmented by the devotion of the people to power and pelf, but devotion to nullity or its alter ego is a weak sentiment, and an empty treasury turns the devotion to pelf into useful channels.
“I was rather amused yesterday by learning that loyalty to King George has extended the commercial relations of the Greeks with the Turks. Greece has imported some boatloads of myrtle branches to make triumphal arches at Syra where the King was expected yesterday. Queen Amalia disciplined King Otho’s subjects to welcome him in this way. The idea of Greeks being ’green’ in anything, though it was only loyalty, amused her in those days. I suppose she knows now that they were not so ’green’ as their myrtles made them look! It is odd, however, to find that their outrageous loyalty succeeded in exterminating myrtle plants in the islands of the Ægean, and that they must now import their emblems of loyalty from the Sultan’s dominions. If a new Venus rise out of the Grecian sea she will have to swim over to the Turkish coast to hide herself in myrtles. There is a new fact for Lord Strangford’s oriental Chaos!
“My wife desires to be most kindly remembered to you.
“Believe me, my dear Miss Cobbe,
“Yours sincerely,
“George Finlay.”
I left Athens and my kind friends with great regret and embarked at the Piræus for Constantinople, but not before I had managed to secure a luxurious swim in one of the exquisite rocky coves along the coast near the Tomb of Themistocles.
Stamboul was rather a disappointment to me. The weather was cold and cloudy and unfit to display the beauty of the Golden Horn; and I went about with a valet de place in rather a disheartened way to see the Dolma Batchi Palace and a few other things accessible to me. The Scutari Hospital across the Bosphorus where Miss Nightingale had worked only four years before, of course, greatly attracted my interest. How much do all women owe to that brave heart who led them on so far on the road to their public duties, and who has paid for her marvellous achievements by just forty years of invalidism! Those pages of Kinglake’s History in which he pays tribute to her power, and compares her great administrative triumph in bringing order out of chaos with the miserable failures of the male officials who had brought about the disastrous muddle, ought to be quoted again and again by all the friends of women, and never suffered to drop into oblivion.
Of course the reader will assume that I saw St. Sophia. But I did not do so, and to the last, I fear I shall owe a little grudge to the people whose extraordinary behaviour made me lose my sole opportunity of enjoying that most interesting sight. I told my valet de place to learn what parties of foreigners were going to obtain the needful firmaun for visiting the Mosque and to arrange for me in the usual way to join one of them, paying my share of the expense, which at that time amounted to £5. Some days were lost, and then I learned that there was only one party, consisting of American ladies and gentlemen, who were then intending to visit the place, and that for some reason their courier would not consent to my joining them. I thought it was some stupid imbroglio of servants wanting fees, and having the utmost confidence in American kindness and good manners, I called on the family in question at their hotel and begged they would do me the favour to allow me to pay part of the £5, and to enter the doors of St. Sophia with them accordingly; at such time as might suit them. To my amazement the gentleman and ladies looked at each other; and then the gentleman spoke, “O! I leave all that to my courier!” “In that case,” I said, “I wish you good morning.” It was a great bore for me, with my great love for architecture, to fail to see so unique a building, but I could not think of spending £5 on a firmaun myself, and had no choice but to relinquish the hope of entering, and merely walk round the Mosque and peep in where it was possible to do so. I was well cursed in doing this by the old Turks for my presumption!
Nemesis overtook these unmannerly people ere long, for they reached Florence a month after me and found I had naturally told my tale of disappointment to the Brownings, (whom they particularly desired to cultivate), the Somervilles, Trollopes and others who had become my friends; and I believe they heard a good deal of the matter. Mrs. Browning, I know, frankly expressed her astonishment at their behaviour; and Mrs. Somerville would have nothing to say to them. They sent me several messages of conciliation and apology, which of course I ignored. They had done a rude and unkind thing to an unknown and friendless woman. They were ready to make advances to one who had plenty of friends. It was the only case, in all my experience of Americans, in which I have found them wanting in either courtesy or kindness.
I had intended to go from Constantinople viâ the Black Sea and the Danube to Vienna and thence by the railway to Adelsberg and Trieste, but a cold, stormy March morning rendered that excursion far less tempting than a return to the sunny waters of Greece; and, as I had nobody to consult, I simply embarked on a different steamer from the one I had designed to take. At Syra (I think) I changed to the most luxurious and delightful vessel on which I have ever sailed—the Austrian Lloyd’s Neptune, Captain Braun. It was splendidly equipped, even to a camera obscura on deck; and every arrangement for luxurious baths and good food was perfect, and the old Captain’s attention and kindness to everyone extreme. I have still the picture of the Neptune, which he drew in my little sketch book for me. There were several very pleasant passengers on board, among others the Marquis of Headfort (nephew of our old neighbour at Newbridge, Mr. Taylor of Ardgillan) and Lady Headfort, who had gone through awful experiences in India, when married to her first husband, Sir William Macnaghten. It was said that when Sir William was cut to pieces, she offered large rewards for the poor relics and received them all, except his head. Months afterwards when she had returned to Calcutta and was expecting some ordinary box of clothes, or the like, she opened a parcel hastily, and was suddenly confronted with a frightful spectacle of her husband’s half-preserved head!
Whether this story be true I cannot say, but Lady Headfort made herself a most agreeable fellow passenger, and we sat up every night till the small hours telling ghost stories. At Corfu I paid a visit to my father’s cousin, Lady Emily Kozzaris (née Trench) whom I had known at Newbridge and who welcomed me as a bit of Ireland, fallen on her
“Isle under Ionian skies
Beautiful as a wreck of paradise.”
I seemed to be en pays de connaissance once more. After two days in Trieste I went up by rail to Adelsberg through the extraordinary district (geologically speaking) of Carniola, where the whole superficial area of the ground is perfectly barren but honey-combed with circular holes of varying depths and size and of the shape of inverted truncated cones; the bottoms of each being highly fertile and cultivated like gardens.
The cavern of Adelsberg was to me one of the most fearsome places in the world. I cannot give any accurate description of it for the sense of awe which always seizes me in the darkness and foul air of caverns and tunnels and pyramids, renders me incapable of listening to details of heights and lengths. I wrote my recollections not long afterwards.
“There were long, long galleries, and chambers, and domes succeeding one another, as it seemed, for ever. Sometimes narrow and low, compelling the visitor to bend and climb; sometimes so wide and lofty that the eye vainly sought to pierce the expanse. And through all the endless labyrinth appeared vaguely in the gloom the forms taken by the stalactites, now white as salt, now yellow and stained as if with age,—representing to the fancy all conceivable objects of earth and sea, piled up in this cave as if in some vast lumberhouse of creation. It was Chaos, when yet all things slept in darkness waiting the fiat of existence. It was the final Ruin when all things shall return to everlasting night, and man and all his works grow into stone and lie buried beside the mammoth and the ichthyosaur. Here were temples and tombs, and vast dim faces, and giant forms lying prone and headless, and huge lions sleeping in dark dens, and white ghosts with phantom raiment flickering in the gloom. And through the caverns, amid all the forms of awe and wonder, rolled a river black as midnight; a deep and rapid river which broke here and there over the rocks as in mockery of the sunny waterfalls of the woods, and gleamed for a moment, white and ghastly, then plunged lower under the black arch into
‘Caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.’
“It is in this deadly river, which never reflects the light of day, that live those strange fleshy lizards without eyes, and seemingly without natural skin, hideous reptiles which have dwelt in darkness from unknown ages, till the organs of sight are effaced.15
“Over this dismal Styx the traveller passes on further and further into the cavern, through seemingly endless corridors and vast cathedral aisles and halls without number. One of these large spaces is so enormous that it seemed as if St. Peter’s whole church and dome could lie beneath it. The men who were with us scaled the walls, threw coloured lights around and rockets up to the roof and dimly revealed the stupendous expanse; an underground hall, where Eblis and all his peers might hold the councils of hell. Further, on yet, through more corridors, more chambers and aisles and domes, with the couchant lions and the altar-tombs and the ghosts and the great white faces all around; and then into a cavern, more lately found than the rest, where the white and yellow marble took forms of screens and organ pipes and richest Gothic tracery of windows,—the region where the Genius of the Cavern had made his royal Oratory. It was all a great, dim, uneasy dream. Things were, and were not. As in dreams we picture places and identify them with those of waking life in some strange unreal identity, while in every particular they vary from the actual place; and as also in dreams we think we have beheld the same objects over and over again, while we only dream we see them, and go on wandering further and further, seeking for some unknown thing, and finding, not that which we seek, but every other thing in existence, and pass through all manner of narrow doors and impenetrable screens, and men speak to us and we cannot hear them, and show us open graves holding dead corpses whose features we cannot discern, and all the world is dim and dark and full of doubt and dread—even so is the Cavern of Adelsberg.”
Returning to Trieste I passed on to Venice, the beauty of which I learned (rather slowly perhaps), to feel by degrees as I rowed in my gondola from church to church and from gallery to palace. The Austrians were then masters of the city, and it was no doubt German music which I heard for the first time at the church of the Scalzi, very finely performed. It was not seldom in the usual English style of sacred music; (I dare say it was not strictly sacred music at all, perhaps quite a profane opera!) but, in the mood I was in, it seemed to me to have a great sanctity of its own; to be a Week-day Song of Heaven. This was one of the rare occasions in my life in which music has reached the deeper springs in me, and it affected me very much. I suppose as the daffodils did Wordsworth.
Naturally being again in a town and at a good hotel, I resumed better clothes than I had worn in my rough rides, and they were, of course that year, deep mourning with much crape on them. I imagine it must have been this English mourning apparel which provoked among the colour-loving Venetians a strange display of Heteropathy,—that deep-seated animal instinct of hatred and anger against grief and suffering, the exact reverse of sympathy, which causes brutes and birds to gore and peck and slay their diseased and dying companions and brutal men to trample on their weeping, starving wives. I was walking alone rather sadly, bent down over the shells on the beach of the Lido, comparing them in my mind to the old venuses and pectens and beautiful pholases which I used to collect on my father’s long stretch of sandy shore in Ireland,—when suddenly I found myself assailed with a shower of stones. Looking up, I saw a little crowd of women and boys jeering at me and pelting me with whatever they could pick up. Of course they could not really hurt me, but after an effort or two at remonstrance, I was fain to give up my walk and return to my gondola and to Venice. Years afterwards, speaking of this incident to Gibson, he told me he had seen at Venice a much worse scene, for the victim was a poor helpless dog which had somehow got into a position from whence it could not escape, and the miserable, hooting, laughing crowd deliberately stoned it to death. The dog looked from one to another of its persecutors as if appealing for mercy and saying, “What have I done to deserve this?” But there was no mercy in those hard hearts.
Ever since I sat on the spot where St. Stephen was stoned, I have felt that that particular form of death must have been one of the most morally trying and dreadful to the sufferer, and the most utterly destructive of the finer instincts in those who inflicted it. If Jews be, as alleged, more prone to cruelty than other nations, the fact seems to me almost explained by the “set of the brains” of a race accustomed to account it a duty to join in stoning an offender to death and watching pitilessly his agonies when mangled, blinded, deafened and bleeding he lies crushed on the ground.
From Venice I travelled very pleasantly in a returning vettura which I was fortunate enough to engage, by Padua and Ferrara over the Apennines to Florence. One day I walked a long way in front during my vetturino’s dinner-hour, and made friends with some poor peasants who welcomed me to their house and to a share of their meal of Polenta and wine. The Polenta was much inferior to Irish oatmeal stirabout or Scotch porridge; and the black wine was like the coarsest vinegar. I tried in vain, out of good manners to drink it. The lives of these poor contadini are obviously in all ways cruelly hard.
Spending one night in a desolate “ramshackle” inn on the road high up on the Apennines, I sat up late writing a description of the place (as “creepy” as I could make it!) to amuse my mother’s dear old servant “Joney,” who possessed a volume of Washington Irving’s stories wherein that of the “Inn at Terracina” had served constantly to excite delightful awe in her breast and in my own as a child. I took my letter next day with me to post in Florence, but alas! found there waiting for me one from my brother announcing that our dear old servant was dead. She had never held up her head after I had left Newbridge, and had cease to drop into her cottage for tea.
At Florence I remained many months (or rather on the hill of Bellosguardo above the city) and made some of the most precious friendships of my life; Mrs. Somerville’s first of all, I also had the privilege to know at that time both Mr. and Mrs. Browning, Adolphus Trollope, Walter Savage Landor, Isa Blagden, Miss White (now Madame Villari), and many other very interesting men and women. I shall, however, write a separate chapter combining this and my subsequent visits to Italy.
Late in the summer I travelled with a party through Milan over St. Gothard to Lucerne, and thence to the Pays de Vaud, where I joined a very pleasant couple,—Rev. W. and Mrs. Biedermann,—in taking the Château du Grand Clos, in the Valley of the Rhone; a curious miniature French country house, built some years before by the man who called himself Louis XVII., or Duc de Normandie; and who had collected (as we found) a considerable library of books, all relating to the French Revolution.
From Switzerland I travelled back to England viâ the Rhine with my dear American friends, the Apthorps, who had joined me at Montreux. The perils and fatigues of my eleven months of solitary wanderings were over. I was stronger and more active in body than I had ever been, and so enriched in mind and heart by the things I had seen and the people I had known, that I could afford to smile at the depression and loneliness of my departure.
As we approached the Black Forest I had a fancy to quit my kind companions for a few days; and leaving them to explore Strasburg, and some other places, I went on to Heidelberg and thence made my way into the beautiful woods. The following lines were written there, September 23rd, 1858:—
ALONE IN THE SCHWARZWALD.
Lord of the Forest Sanctuary! Thou
By the grey fathers of the world in these
Thine own self-fashioned shrines dimly adored,
“All-Father Odin,” “Mover” of the spheres;
Zeus! Brahm! Ormusd! Lord of Light Divine!
God, blessed God! the Good One! Best of names,
By noblest Saxon race found Thee at last,—
O Father! when the slow revolving years
Bring forth the day when men shall see Thy face
Unveiled from superstition’s web of errors old,
Shall they not seek Thee here amid the woods,
Rather than in the pillared aisle, or dome
By loftiest genius reared?
Six months have rolled
Since I stood solitary in the fane
Of desolate Baalbec. The huge walls closed
Round me sublime as when millenniums past
Lost nations worshipped there. I sate beside
The altar stone o’erthrown. For hours I sate
Until the homeward-winging hawk at even
Shrieked when he saw me there, a human form
Where human feet tread once perchance a year,
Then the moon slowly rose above the walls
And then I knelt. It was a glorious fane
All, all my own.
But not that grand Baalbec,
Nor Parthenon, nor Rome’s stupendous pile,
Nor lovelier Milan, nor the Sepulchre
So dark and solemn where the Christ was laid,
Nor even yet that dreadful field of death
At Ghizeh where the eternal Pyramids
Have, from a world of graves, pointed to Heav’n
For fifty ages past,—not all these shrines
Are holy to my soul as are the woods.
Lo! how God Himself has planned this place
So that all sweet and calm and solemn thoughts
Should have their nests amid the shadowy trees!
How the rude work-day world is all closed out
By the thick curtained foliage, and the sky
Alone revealed, a deep zenith heaven,
Fitly beheld through clasped and upraised arms
Of prayer-like trees. There is no sound more loud
Than the low insect hum, the chirp of birds,
The rustling murmur of embracing boughs,
The gentle dropping of the autumn leaves.
The wood’s sweet breath is incense. From the pines
And larch and chestnut come rich odours pure;
All things are pure and sweet and holy here.
I lie down underneath the firs. The moss
Makes richest cushion for my weary limbs!
Long I gaze upward while the dark green boughs
Moveless project against the azure sky,
Fringed with their russet cones. My satiate eyes
Sink down at length. I turn my cheek to earth.
What may this be, this sense of youth restored,
My happy childhood with its sunbright hours,
Returning once again as in a dream?
’Tis but the odour of the mossy ground,
The “field-smells known in infancy,” when yet,
Our childish sports were near to mother Earth,
Our child-like hearts near to the God in Heaven.