LETTER LXIII.
A MELANCHOLY PROCESSION—LAGO MAGGIORE—ISOLA BELLA—THE SIMPLON—MEETING A FELLOW-COUNTRYMAN—THE VALLEY OF THE RHONE.
In going out of the gates of Milan, we met a cart full of peasants, tied together and guarded by gens d'armes, the fifth sight of the kind that has crossed us since we passed the Austrian border. The poor fellows looked very innocent and very sorry. The extent of their offences probably might be the want of a passport, and a desire to step over the limits of his majesty's possessions. A train of beautiful horses, led by soldiers along the ramparts, the property of the Austrian officers, were in melancholy contrast to their sad faces.
The clear snowy Alps soon came in sight, and their cold beauty refreshed us in the midst of a heat that prostrated every nerve in the system. It is only the first of May, and they are mowing the grass everywhere on the road, the trees are in their fullest leaf, the frogs and nightingales singing each other down, and the grasshopper would be a burden. Toward night we crossed the Sardinian frontier, and in an hour were set down at an auberge on the bank of Lake Maggiore, in the little town of Arona. The mountains on the other side of the broad and mirror-like water, are speckled with ruined castles, here and there a boat is leaving its long line of ripples behind in its course, the cattle are loitering home, the peasants sit on the benches before their doors, and all the lovely circumstances of a rural summer's sunset are about us, in one of the very loveliest spots in nature. A very old Florence friend is my companion, and what with mutual reminiscences of sunny Tuscany, and the deepest love in common for the sky over our heads, and the green land around us, we are noting down "red days" in our calendar of travel.
We walked from Arona by sunrise, four or five miles along the borders of Lake Maggiore. The kind-hearted peasants on their way to the market raised their hats to us in passing, and I was happy that the greeting was still "buon giorno." Those dark-lined mountains before us were to separate me too soon from the mellow accents in which it was spoken. As yet, however, it was all Italian—the ultra-marine sky, the clear, half-purpled hills, the inspiring air—we felt in every pulse that it was still Italy.
We were at Baveno at an early hour, and took a boat for Isola Bella. It looks like a gentleman's villa afloat. A boy would throw a stone entirely over it in any direction. It strikes you like a kind of toy as you look at it from a distance, and getting nearer, the illusion scarcely dissipates—for, from the water's edge, the orange-laden terraces are piled one above another like a pyramidal fruit-basket, the villa itself peers above like a sugar castle, and it scarce seems real enough to land upon. We pulled round to the northern side, and disembarked at a broad stone staircase, where a cicerone, with a look of suppressed wisdom, common to his vocation, met us with the offer of his services.
The entrance-hall was hung with old armor, and a magnificent suite of apartments above, opening on all sides upon the lake, was lined thickly with pictures, none of them remarkable except one or two landscapes by the savage Tempesta. Travellers going the other way would probably admire the collection more than we. We were glad to be handed over by our pragmatical custode to a pretty contadina, who announced herself as the gardener's daughter, and gave us each a bunch of roses. It was a proper commencement to an acquaintance upon Isola Bella. She led the way to the water's edge, where, in the foundations of the palace, a suite of eight or ten spacious rooms is constructed a la grotte—with a pavement laid of small stones of different colors, walls and roof of fantastically set shells and pebbles, and statues that seem to have reason in their nudity. The only light came in at the long doors opening down to the lake, and the deep leather sofas, and dark cool atmosphere, with the light break of the waves outside, and the long views away toward Isola Madra, and the far-off opposite shore, composed altogether a most seductive spot for an indolent humor and a summer's day. I shall keep it as a cool recollection till sultry summers trouble me no more.
But the garden was the prettiest place. The lake is lovely enough any way; but to look at it through perspectives of orange alleys, and have the blue mountains broken by stray branches of tulip-trees, clumps of crimson rhododendron, and clusters of citron, yellower than gold; to sit on a garden-seat in the shade of a thousand roses, with sweet-scented shrubs and verbenums, and a mixture of novel and delicious perfumes embalming the air about you, and gaze up at snowy Alps and sharp precipices, and down upon a broad smooth mirror in which the islands lie like clouds, and over which the boats are silently creeping with their white sails, like birds asleep in the sky—why (not to disparage nature), it seems to my poor judgment, that these artificial appliances are an improvement even to Lago Maggiore.
On one side, without the villa walls, are two or three small houses, one of which is occupied as a hotel; and here, if I had a friend with matrimony in his eye, would I strongly recommend lodgings for the honeymoon. A prettier cage for a pair of billing doves no poet would conceive you.
We got on to Domo d'Ossola to sleep, saying many an oft-said thing about the entrance to the valleys of the Alps. They seem common when spoken of, these romantic places, but they are not the less new in the glow of a first impression.
We were a little in start of the sun this morning, and commenced the ascent of the Simplon by a gray summer's dawn, before which the last bright star had not yet faded. From Domo d'Ossola we rose directly into the mountains, and soon wound into the wildest glens by a road which was flung along precipices and over chasms and waterfalls like a waving riband. The horses went on at a round trot, and so skilfully are the difficulties of the ascent surmounted, that we could not believe we had passed the spot that from below hung above us so appallingly. The route follows the foaming river Vedro, which frets and plunges along at its side or beneath its hanging bridges, with the impetuosity of a mountain torrent, where the stream is swollen at every short distance with pretty waterfalls, messengers from the melting snows on the summits. There was one, a water-slide rather than a fall, which I stopped long to admire. It came from near the peak of the mountain, leaping at first from a green clump of firs, and descending a smooth inclined plane, of perhaps two hundred feet. The effect was like drapery of the most delicate lace, dropping into festoons from the hand. The slight waves overtook each other and mingled and separated, always preserving their elliptical and foaming curves, till, in a smooth scoop near the bottom, they gathered into a snowy mass, and leaped into the Vedro in the shape of a twisted shell. If wishing could have witched it into Mr. Cole's sketch-book, he would have a new variety of water for his next composition.
After seven hours' driving, which scarce seemed ascending but for the snow and ice and the clear air it brought us into, we stopped to breakfast at the village of Simplon, "three thousand, two hundred and sixteen feet above the sea level." Here we first realized that we had left Italy. The landlady spoke French and the postillions German! My sentiment has grown threadbare with travel, but I don't mind confessing that the circumstance gave me an unpleasant thickness in the throat. I threw open the southern window, and looked back toward the marshes of Lombardy, and if I did not say the poetical thing, it was because
"It is the silent grief that cuts the heart-strings."
In sober sadness, one may well regret any country where his life has been filled fuller than elsewhere of sunshine and gladness; and such, by a thousand enchantments, has Italy been to me. Its climate is life in my nostrils, its hills and valleys are the poetry of such things, and its marbles, pictures, and palaces, beset the soul like the very necessities of existence. You can exist elsewhere, but oh! you live in Italy!
I was sitting by my English companion on a sledge in front of the hotel, enjoying the sunshine, when the diligence drove up, and six or eight young men alighted. One of them, walking up and down the road to get the cramp of a confined seat out of his legs, addressed a remark to us in English. We had neither of us seen him before, but we exclaimed simultaneously, as he turned away, "That's an American." "How did you know he was not an Englishman?" I asked. "Because," said my friend, "he spoke to us without an introduction and without a reason, as Englishmen are not in the habit of doing, and because he ended his sentence with 'sir,' as no Englishman does except he is talking to an inferior, or wishes to insult you. And how did you know it?" asked he. "Partly by instinct," I answered, "but more, because though a traveller, he wears a new hat that cost him ten dollars, and a new cloak that cost him fifty, (a peculiarly American extravagance,) because he made no inclination of his body either in addressing or leaving us, though his intention was to be civil, and because he used fine dictionary words to express a common idea, which, by the way, too, betrays his southern breeding. And if you want other evidence, he has just asked the gentleman near him to ask the conducteur something about his breakfast, and an American is the only man in the world who ventures to come abroad without at least French enough to keep himself from starving." It may appear ill-natured to write down such criticisms on one's own countryman; but the national peculiarities by which we are distinguished from foreigners, seemed so well defined in this instance, that I thought it worth mentioning. We found afterward that our conjecture was right. His name and country were on the brass plate of his portmanteau in most legible letters, and I recognized it directly as the address of an amiable and excellent man, of whom I had once or twice heard in Italy, though I had never before happened to meet him. Three of the faults oftenest charged upon our countrymen, are over-fine clothes, over fine-words, and over-fine, or over-free manners!
From Simplon we drove two or three miles between heaps of snow, lying in some places from ten to six feet deep. Seven hours before, we had ridden through fields of grain almost ready for the harvest. After passing one or two galleries built over the road to protect it from the avalanches where it ran beneath the loftier precipices, we got out of the snow, and saw Brig, the small town at the foot of the Simplon, on the other side, lying almost directly beneath us. It looked as if one might toss his cap down into its pretty gardens. Yet we were four or five hours in reaching it, by a road that seemed in most parts scarcely to descend at all. The views down the valley of the Rhone, which opened continually before us, were of exquisite beauty, The river itself, which is here near its source, looked like a meadow rivulet in its silver windings, and the gigantic Helvetian Alps which rose in their snow on the other side of the valley, were glittering in the slant rays of a declining sun, and of a grandeur of size and outline which diminished, even more than distance, the river and the clusters of villages at their feet.