V
THE COUNTRY OF MRS. HUMPHRY WARD
V
THE COUNTRY OF MRS. HUMPHRY WARD
I
MRS. WARD AND HER WORK
“‘Why does any one stay in England who can make the trip to Paradise?’ said the duchess, as she leaned lazily back in the corner of the boat and trailed her fingers in the waters of Como.”
These words from “Lady Rose’s Daughter” came to mind as we glided swiftly in a little motor-boat, late in the afternoon of a perfect April day, over the smooth waters of Como and into the arm of the lake known as Lecco, where we were to enjoy our cup of tea in a little latteria high up on a rocky crag. In the stern sat Mrs. Ward, looking the picture of contentment, a light summer hat with simple trimmings giving an almost girlish aspect to a face in which strong intellectuality and depth of moral purpose were clearly the predominating features. A day’s work done,—for Mrs. Ward goes to Como for work, not play,—this little trip across the lake was one of her favorite recreations, in which, for the time, we were hospitably permitted to share. About us were the scenes “enchanted, incomparable,” which are best described in the words of Mrs. Ward herself:—
When Spring descends upon the shores of the Lago di Como, she brings with her all the graces, all the beauties, all the fine, delicate, and temperate delights of which earth and sky are capable, and she pours them forth upon a land of perfect loveliness. Around the shores of other lakes—Maggiore, Lugano, Garda—blue mountains rise and the vineyards spread their green and dazzling terraces to the sun. Only Como can show in unmatched union a main composition, incomparably grand and harmonious, combined with every jeweled or glowing or exquisite detail. Nowhere do the mountains lean towards each other in such an ordered splendor as that which bends around the northern shores of Como. Nowhere do buttressed masses rise behind each other, to right and left of a blue waterway, in lines statelier or more noble than those kept by the mountains of Lecco Lake as they marshal themselves on either hand, along the approaches to Lombardy and Venetia.
| MRS. HUMPHRY WARD AND MISS DOROTHY WARD |
... And within this divine framework, between the glistening snows which still, in April, crown and glorify the heights, and those reflections of them which lie encalmed in the deep bosom of the lake, there’s not a foot of pasture, not a shelf of vineyard, not a slope of forest, where the spring is not at work, dyeing the turf with gentians, starring it with narcissuses, or drawing across it the first golden network of the chestnut leaves; where the mere emerald of the grass is not in itself a thing to refresh the very springs of being; where the peach-blossom and the wild cherry and the olive are not perpetually weaving patterns on the blue which ravish the very heart out of your breast. And already the roses are beginning to pour over the wall; the wistaria is climbing up the cypresses; a pomp of camellias and azaleas is in all the gardens; while in the glassy bays that run up into the hills the primrose banks still keep their sweet austerity, and the triumph of spring over the just banished winter is still sharp and new.