"'What! Don Miguel? Give me your hand.'
"'I have already given it to you, Don John; if it could grow again, by my faith, I would give it to you again.'
"And the wounded man showed in the dark his mutilated arm wrapped in bloody linen. Don John then recognised in him the soldier who had supported him when falling and in danger of his life; he was silent, and had it not been for the darkness, we should have seen the unconquerable captain weep. After a short pause, Don John resumed in a moved voice:
"'And when did you arrive? And why did you not present yourself?'
"Don Miguel replied:
"'I arrived late, because, thanks to the sacred college of the Muses,[59] of whom I confess myself a most unworthy priest, I had not money enough to pay for a horse or carriage to go from Genoa to Naples; and God knows how I grieved about it, for fear of not arriving in time; but as it pleased Our Lady, I reached the army in time for the review which you held at Gomenizze. I had resolved to place myself during the battle at your side, prepared to defend with my life the most valiant champion of Christianity, and the noblest blood of Spain. Fortune, kind to me for this once, assented fully to my design, and I ought to thank her, if, having resigned my life to her, she restored it to me with one hand the less. It seemed then better to me not to discover myself, for if death spared me, I could have pressed your honored hand, and rejoiced in your glory; if, on the contrary, it was destined that I should fall, you, being ignorant of it, would not have grieved for me; and, finally, if we had both died, we should now be together in the presence of God.'
"These simple words, yet full of majesty and greatness, filled us with wonder; when a Spaniard interrupted our holy silence, observing:—'Who would have believed we should meet our Poet among the warriors of Lepanto?'—To which observation Don Miguel calmly replied:
"'Sir knight, your wonder would cease, if you would for a moment consider that all that which appears to us great, noble, and glorious, is poetry. Our Don John ought to be hailed as the greatest Poet of Spain.... There are two kinds of Poets—those who enact glorious things, and those who sing them. Don John has given us the subject of the poem—now who will write for him the noble Epic? Ah! Lord ... not I ... for I am not equal to the task.'
"Thus met the two choicest spirits that Spain ever produced: both very great and both very unhappy, and held in little repute in that country, which shall have fame among posterity principally because it was their native place.
"As Veniero had foreseen, a terrible storm raged during the night. The burning galleys, blazing more than ever, now appeared upon the summit of the waves, now disappeared; some, leaning sideways, moved rapidly on the surface of the water.... Indeed they looked like demons, who issuing from hell had come to gather souls, and to exult over the immense slaughter in the place of combat!—On the morrow, thousands of corpses were washed on shore, and the ocean rolled on as in the first days of creation: the swelling surge breaking against the shore, seemed to say:—'O land, take back your children; behold! with a breath of my nostrils I have repulsed this bloody and cruel dust, which you call humanity. If your children love to furrow my face, I soon close up this furrow, so that none can find the trace of it. If I bear them on my back, I do it as a boy with playthings, in order to divert myself, and then I break them: behold, I have purified myself from them; the trace of the slaughter of Lepanto remains upon me as the trace of the halcyon's flight through the air. You, my unworthy sister, allow their cities to stand, and, daily torn and tortured in a thousand ways, dare not revenge yourself but from your open furrows send forth everlasting fruits to nourish them; come! be wise once, open your bosom and bury them all. If when greatly angered, you overthrow some city, or swallow some chain of mountains, your wrath seems more like that of a mother who chides, than an executioner who punishes. I, once, came to wash you with a universal ablution, and would gladly do it again, for I see that you are more stained than before, if the word of God did not repulse me from your shores. Come, beg the Creator with me to revoke the command, and I will clean you for ever with the multitude of my waters,—with a deluge—for this time;—without Noah.' ... Thus my affected fancy imagined.—How much all Christendom exulted, you all know.