Hyperion Part 18

Last night he had heard a voice to which his soul responded; and he might have gone on his way, and taken no farther heed. But he would have heard that voice afterwards, whenever at evening he thought of this evening at Interlachen. To-day he had seen more clearly the vision, and his restless soul calm. The place seemed pleasant to him; and he could not go. He did not ask himself whence came this calm. He felt it; and was happy in the feeling; and blessed thelandscape and the summer morning, as if they possessed the wonder-working power.

"A pleasant morning dream to you;" said a friendly voice; and at the same moment some one laid his hand upon Flemming's shoulder. It was Berkley. He had approached unseen and unheard.

"I see by the smile on your countenance," he continued, "that it is no day-incubus."

"You are right," replied Flemming. "It was a pleasant dream, which you have put to flight."

"And I am glad to see, that you have also put to flight the gloomy thoughts which used to haunt you. I like to see people cheerful and happy. What is the use of giving way to sadness in this beautiful world?"

"Ah! this beautiful world!" said Flemming, with a smile. "Indeed, I know not what to think of it. Sometimes it is all gladness and suns.h.i.+ne, and Heaven itself lies not far off. And then it changes suddenly; and is dark and sorrowful, and clouds shut out the sky. In the lives of the saddestof us, there are bright days like this, when we feel as if we could take the great world in our arms and kiss it.

Then come the gloomy hours, when the fire will neither burn on our hearths nor in our hearts; and all without and within is dismal, cold, and dark. Believe me, every heart has its secret sorrows, which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad."

"And who says we don't?" interrupted Berkley. "Come, come! Let us go to breakfast. The morning air has given me a rude appet.i.te. I long to say grace over a fresh egg; and eat salt with my worst enemies; namely, the c.o.c.kneys at the hotel. After breakfast you must give yourself up wholly to me. I shall take you to the Grindelwald!"

"To-day, then, you do not breakfast like Diogenes, but consent to leave your tub."

"Yes, for the pleasure of your company. I shall also blow out the light in my lantern, having found you."

"Thank you."

The breakfast pa.s.sed without any unusual occurrence. Flemming watched the entrance of every guest; but she came not,--the guest he most desired to see.

"And now for the Grindelwald!" said Berkley.

"Why such haste? We have the whole day before us. There is time enough."

"Not a moment to loso, I a.s.sure you. The carriage is at the door."

They drove up the valley of Lauterbrunnen, and turned eastward among the mountains of the Grindelwald. There they pa.s.sed the day; half-frozen by the icy breath of the Great Glacier, upon whose surface stand pyramids and blocks of ice, like the tombstones of a cemetery. It was a weary day to Flemming. He wished himself at Interlachen; and was glad when, towards evening, he saw once more the cone-roofed towers of the cloister rising above the walnut trees.

That evening is written in red letters in his history. It gave him another revelation of thebeauty and excellence of the female character and intellect; not wholly new to him, yet now renewed and fortified. It was from the lips of Mary Ashburton, that the revelation came. Her form arose, like a tremulous evening star, in the firmament of his soul. He conversed with her; and with her alone; and knew not when to go. All others were to him as if they were not there. He saw their forms, but saw them as the forms of inanimate things. At length her mother came; and Flemming beheld in her but another Mary Ashburton, with beauty more mature;--the same forehead and eyes, the same majestic figure; and, as yet, no trace of age. He gazed upon her with a feeling of delight, not unmingled with holy awe. She was to him the rich and glowing Evening, from whose bosom the tremulous star was born.

Berkley took no active part in the conversation, but did what was much more to the purpose, that it is to say, arranged a drive for the next day with the Ashburtons, and of course invited Flemming, who went home that night with a halo round hishead; and wondering much at a dandy, who stood at the door of the hotel, and said to his companion, as Flemming pa.s.sed;

"What do you call this place? I have been here two hours already, and find it devilish dull!"

CHAPTER V. A RAINY DAY.

When Flemming awoke the next morning he saw the sky dark and lowering. From the mountain tops hung a curtain of mist, whose heavy folds waved to and fro in the valley below. Over all the landscape, the soft, summer rain was falling. No admiring eyes would look up that day at the Staubbach.

A rainy day in Switzerland puts a sudden stop to many diversions.

The coachman may drive to the tavern and then back to the stable; but no farther. The sunburnt guide may sit at the ale-house door, and welcome; and the boatman whistle and curse the clouds, at his own sweet will; but no foot stirs abroad for all that; no traveller moves, if he has time to stay. The rainy daygives him time for reflection. He has leisure now to take cognizance of his impressions, and make up his account with the mountains. He remembers, too, that he has friends at home; and writes up the Journal, neglected for a week or more; and letters neglected longer; or finishes the rough pencil-sketch, begun yesterday in the open air. On the whole he is not sorry it rains; though disappointed.

Flemming was both sorry and disappointed; but he did not on that account fail to go over to the Ashburtons at the appointed hour. He found them sitting in the parlour. The mother was reading, and the daughter retouching a sketch of the Lake of Thun. After the usual salutations, Flemming seated himself near the daughter, and said;

"We shall have no Staubbach to-day, I presume; only this Giessbach from the clouds."

"Nothing more, I suppose. So we must be content to stay in-doors; and listen to the soundof the eves-dropping rain. It gives me time to finish some of these rough sketches."

"It is a pleasant pastime," said Flemming; "and I perceive you are very skilful. I am delighted to see, that you can draw a straight line. I never before saw a lady's sketch-book, in which all the towers did not resemble the leaning Tower of Pisa. I always tremble for the little men under them."

"How absurd!" exclaimed Mary Ashburton, with a smile that pa.s.sed through the misty air of Flemming's thoughts, like a sunbeam; "For one, I succeed much better in straight lines than in any others.

Here I have been trying a half-hour to make this water-wheel round; and round it never will be."

"Then let it remain as it is. It looks uncommonly picturesque, and may pa.s.s for a new invention."

The lady continued to sketch, and Flemming to gaze at her beautiful face; often repeating to himself those lines in Marlow's Faust;

"O thou art fairer than the evening air,

Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars!"

He certainly would have betrayed himself to the maternal eye of Mrs. Ashburton, had she not been wholly absorbed in the follies of a fas.h.i.+onable novel. Ere long the fair sketcher had paused for a moment; and Flemming had taken her sketch-book in his hands and was looking it through from the beginning with ever-increasing delight, half of which he dared not express, though he favored her with some comments and bursts of admiration.

"This is truly a very beautiful sketch of Murten and the battle-field! How quietly the land-scape sleeps there by the lake, after the battle! Did you ever read the ballad of Veit Weber, the shoe-maker, on this subject? He says, the routed Burgundians jumped into the lake, and the Swiss Leaguers shot them down like wild ducks among the reeds. He fought in the battle and wrote the ballad afterwards;--

'He had himself laid hand on sword,

He who this rhyme did write;

Till evening mowed he with the sword,

And sang the song at night.'"

"You must give me the whole ballad," said Miss Ashburton; "it will serve to ill.u.s.trate the sketch."

"And the sketch to ill.u.s.trate the ballad. And now we suddenly slide down the Alps into Italy, and are even in Rome, if I mistake not. This is surely a head of Homer?"

"Yes," replied the lady, with a little enthusiasm. "Do you not remember the marble bust at Rome? When I first beheld that bust, it absolutely inspired me with awe. It is not the face of a man, but of a G.o.d!"

"And you have done it no injustice in your copy," said Flemming, catching a new enthusiasm from hers. "With what a cla.s.sic grace the fillet, pa.s.sing round the majestic forehead, confines his flowing locks, which mingle with his beard! The countenance, too, is calm, majestic, G.o.dlike! Even the fixed and sightless eyeb.a.l.l.s do not mar the imageof the seer! Such were the sightless eyes of the blind old man of Chios. They seem to look with mournful solemnity into the mysterious future; and the marble lips to repeat that prophetic pa.s.sage in the Hymn to Apollo; 'Let me also hope to be remembered in ages to come. And when any one, born of the tribes of men, comes. .h.i.ther, a weary traveller, and inquires, who is the sweetest of the Singing Men, that resort to your feasts, and whom you most delight to hear, do you make answer for me. It is the Blind Man, who dwells in Chios; his songs excel all that can ever be sung!' But do you really believe, that this is a portrait of Homer?"

"Certainly not! It is only an artist's dream. It was thus, that Homer appeared to him in his visions of the antique world. Every one, you know, forms an image in his fancy of persons and things he has never seen; and the artist reproduces them in marble or on canva.s.s."

"And what is the image in your fancy? Is it like this?"

"No; not entirely. I have drawn my impressions from another source. Whenever I think of Homer, which is not often, he walks before me, solemn and serene, as in the vision of the great Italian; in countenance neither sorrowful nor glad, followed by other bards, and holding in his right hand a sword!"

"That is a finer conception, than even this," said Flemming. "And I perceive from your words, as well as from this book, that you have a true feeling for art, and understand what it is. You have had bright glimpses into the enchanted land."

"I trust," replied the lady modestly, "that I am not wholly without this feeling. Certainly I have as strong and pa.s.sionate a love of Art as of Nature."

"But does it not often offend you to hear people speaking of Art and Nature as opposite and discordant things? Surely nothing can be more false. Nature is a revelation of G.o.d; Art a revelation of man.

Indeed, Art signifies no more than this. Art is Power. That is the original meaning of the word. It is the creative power by which the soul of man makes itself known, through some external manifestation or outward sign. As we can always hear the voice of G.o.d, walking in the garden, in the cool of the day, or under the star-light, where, to quote one of this poet's verses, 'high prospects and the brows of all steep hills and pinnacles thrust up themselves for shows';--so, under the twilight and the starlight of past ages, do we hear the voice of man, walking amid the works of his hands, and city walls and towers and the spires of churches, thrust up themselves for shows."