A dusky veil ash-gray as the moonpale moth’s grey wing;
Of thicket-stillness woven, and sleep of grass, and thin evanishing air
Where the tall reed spires breathless—for I am tired, O Sigher of Sleep,
And long for thy muffled song as of bells on the wind, and the wind’s cry
Falling, and the dim wastes that lie
Beyond the last, low, dim, oblivious sigh.
During a short visit to Maniace W. S. wrote to Mrs. Philpot:
11th Nov., 1903.
... At this season of the year, beautiful and unique in its appeal and singular wild fascination as it is, this place does not suit me climatically, being for one thing too high between 2,000 and 3,000 ft. and also too much under the domination of Etna, who swings vast electric current, and tosses thunder charged cloud-masses to and fro like a Titan acolyte swinging mighty censers at the feet of the Sun. We drive to Taormina on Tuesday and the divine beauty and not less divinely balmy and regenerative climate—sitting as she does like the beautiful goddess Falcone worshipped there of old, perched on her orange and olive-clad plateau, hundreds of feet above the peacock-hued Ionian Sea, with one hand as it were reaching back to Italy (Calabria ever like opal or amethyst to the North-east), with the other embracing all the lands of Etna to Syracuse and the Hyblæan Mount, the lands of Empedocles and Theocritus, of Æschylus and Pindar, of Stesichorus and Simonides, and so many other great names—and with her face ever turned across the Ionian Sea to that ancient Motherland of Hellas, where once your soul and mine surely sojourned.
We shall have a delightful “going” and one you would enjoy to the full.... Tomorrow if fine and radiant we start for that absolutely unsurpassable expedition to the great orange gardens a thousand feet lower at the S. W. end of the Duchy. We first drive some eight miles or so through wild mountain land till we come to the gorges of the Simeto and there we mount our horses and mules and with ample escort before and behind ride in single file for about an hour and a half. Suddenly we come upon one of the greatest orange groves in Europe—26,000 trees in full fruit, an estimated crop of 3,000,000! stretching between the rushing Simeto and great cliffs. Then once more to the saddle and back a different way to barbaric Bronte and thence a ten mile drive back along the ancient Greek highway from Naxos to sacred Enna. And so, for the moment, à revedèrla!”