Reveries of a Bachelor; or, A Book of the Heart

by Donald Grant Mitchell

Day after day we stretched on over the mountains, leaving the Campagna far behind us. Rocks and stones, huge and ragged, lie strewn over the surface right and left; deep yawning valleys lie in the shadows of mountains, that loom up thousands of feet, bearing, perhaps, upon their tops old castellated towns, perched like birds’ nests. But mountain and valley are blasted and scarred; the forests even are not continuous, but struggle for a livelihood; as if the brimstone fire that consumed Nineveh, had withered their energies. Sometimes our eyes rest on a great white scar of the broken calcareous rock, on which the moss cannot grow, and the lizards dare not creep. Then we see a cliff beetling far aloft, with the shining walls of some monastery of holy men glistening at its base. The wayside brooks do not seem to be the gentle offspring of bountiful hills, but the remnants of something greater, whose greatness has expired—they are turbid rills, rolling in the bottom of yawning chasms. Even the shrubs have a look, as if the Volscian war-horse had trampled them down to death; and the primroses and the violets by the mountain path alone look modestly beautiful amid the ruin.

Sometimes we loiter in a valley, above which the goats are browsing on the cliffs, and listen to the sweet pastoral pipes of the Appenines. We see the shepherds in their rough skin coats, high over our heads. Their herds are feeding, as it seems, on ledges of a hand’s breadth. The sweet sound floats and lingers in the soft atmosphere, without a breath of wind to bear it away, or a noise to disturb its melody. The shadows slant more and more as we linger; and the kids begin to group together. And as we wander on, through the stunted vineyard in the bottom of the valley, the sweet sound flows after us, like a river of song—nor leaves us, till the kids have vanished in the distance, and the cliffs themselves, become one dark wall of shadow.

At night, in some little meager mountain town, we stroll about in the narrow passways, or wander under the heavy arches of the mountain churches. Shuffling old women grope in and out; dim lamps glimmer faintly at the side altars, shedding horrid light upon painted images of the dying Christ. Or, perhaps, to make the old pile more solemn, there stands some bier in the middle, with a figure or two kneeling at the foot, and ragged boys move stealthily under the shadows of the columns. Presently comes a young priest, in black robes, and lights a taper at the foot, and another at the head—for there is a dead man on the bier; and the parched, thin features look awfully under the yellow light of the tapers, in the gloom of the great building. It is very, very damp in the church, and the body of the dead man seems to make the air heavy, so we go out into the starlight again.

In the morning, the western slopes wear broad shadows, and the frosts crumple, on the herbage, to our tread: across the valley, it is like summer; and the birds—for there are songsters in the Appenines—make summer music. Their notes blend softly with the faint sounds of some far-off convent bell, tolling for morning mass, and strike the frosted and shaded mountain side, with a sweet echo. As we toil on, and the shaded hills begin to glow in the sunshine, we pass a train of mules, loaded with wine. We have seen them an hour before—little black dots twining along the white streak of footway upon the mountain above us. We lost them as we began to ascend, until a wild snatch of an Appenine song turned our eyes up, and there, straggling through the brush, they appeared again; a foot slip would have brought the mules and wine casks rolling upon us. We keep still, holding by the brushwood, to let them pass. An hour more, and we see them toiling slowly—mule and muleteer—big dots and little dots—far down where we have been before. The sun is hot and smoking on them in the bare valleys; the sun is hot and smoking on the hill side, where we are toiling over the broken stones. I thought of little Enrica, when she said: “the spring was coming!”

Time and again we sit down together—my friend and I—upon some fragment of rock, under the broad-armed chestnuts, that fringe the lower skirts of the mountains, and talk through the hottest of the noon, of the warriors of Sylla, and of the Sabine woman—but oftener—of the pretty peasantry, and of the sweet-faced Roman girl. He, too, tells me of his life and loves, and of the hopes that lie misty and grand before him: little did we think that in so few years, his hopes would be gone, and his body lying low in the Adriatic, or tossed with the drift upon the Dalmatian shores! Little did I think that here under the ancestral wood—still a wishful and blundering mortal, I should be gathering up the shreds that memory can catch of our Appenine wandering, and be weaving them into my bachelor dreams.

Away again upon the quick wing of thought, I follow our steps, as after weeks of wandering, we gained once more a height that overlooked the Campagna—and saw the sun setting on its edge, throwing into relief the dome of St. Peter’s, and blazing in a red stripe upon the waters of the Tiber.

Below us was Palestrina—the Præneste of the poets and philosophers; the dwelling place of—I know not how many—emperors. We went straggling through the dirty streets, searching for some tidy-looking osteria. At length we found an old lady who could give us a bed, but no dinner. My friend dropped in a chair disheartened. A snub-looking priest came out to condole with us.

And could Palestrina—the frigidum Præneste of Horace, which had entertained over and over, the noblest of the Colonna, and the most noble Adrian—could Palestrina not furnish a dinner to a tired traveler?

“Si, Signore,” said the snub-looking priest.

“Si, Signorino,” said the neat old lady; and away we went upon a new search. And we found bright and happy faces; especially the little girl of twelve years, who came close by me as I ate, and afterward strung a garland of marigolds, and put it on my head. Then there was a bright-eyed boy of fourteen, who wrote his name, and those of the whole family, upon a fly-leaf of my book; and a pretty, saucy-looking girl of sixteen, who peeped a long time from behind the kitchen door, but before the evening was gone, she was in the chair beside me, and had written her name—Carlotta—upon the first leaf of my journal.