But what signified this turbid seething of servile passions, seen through that silence which surrounds Rome with its nine circles like a river of Tartarus? I was consoled for all my disappointment by this sublime spectacle of the Campagna strewn with great dead things, where nothing ever springs up save blades of grass, germs of fever, and terrible thoughts. “Is there a new nation struggling within the walls of the city? Ere long a few ashes will be borne to me on the wind. My barrenness is made of a layer of ashes, some precious and some ignoble. And the iron for the plough which shall furrow me has not yet been drawn from the mountain.” This is what the sepulchre of the nations signified to me.
And yet, though the sight of that voracious desert be a sinister warning to an unprofitable nation, it can inspire the solitary man with the wildest intoxication of which the soul is capable. From the crevices of that soil a feverish vapour ascends like smoke, and works like a magic philtre in the blood of some men, producing a form of madness unlike any other.
The young men of the Garibaldian troops, I thought, must have felt themselves possessed by this madness as they entered the Campagna. They were suddenly transfigured by a flame which consumed them like dry wood. And in one here and there that fever magnified his own inward vision in such a way that he ceased to form part of a compact and unanimous band, and assumed an individuality of his own, a singularly warlike aspect, consecrated to a new onward movement. Fair and noble of race like a virgin hero of the time of Ajax, the type of the old warlike ideal, strengthened by a spirit of unexampled ardour, which came to him from the soil he trod, seemed to be renewed in such an one as he fell.
I envied him that happy fate which was denied to me. Several times after these inspiring reflections, a furious desire to prove my valour consumed me, and I would put my horse at some very high piece of ruined wall, and, the useless danger overcome, I would feel that always and everywhere I should have known how to die.
I remember as one of the most intense periods in my life an autumn passed in daily communion with the Latian desert.
Over that theatre, where a drama of races unfolded itself before my mental vision, there passed a perpetual variety of clouds whose great fleeting shadows made the commentary on my inward musings. Sometimes the silence became so heavy, and the odour of death wafted up in my face from the grass so suffocating, that instinctively I clung closer to my horse, as though I wished to feel a share in his impetuous vitality. Then the fine powerful animal would spring forward with feline agility, and the inextinguishable fire burning in his pure blood would seem to communicate itself to me. Then for a few minutes I tasted intoxication. As I followed the line in which I was carried by the impetus of the gallop and the thoughts in my mind, a line parallel to the vast skeletons of the aqueducts which crowded the horizon, I felt the birth and growth within me of an indescribable spirit of fervour—a mixture of physical impulse, of intellectual pride and of confused hopes; and my energies were stimulated and multiplied by the presence of those works of man, of those human witnesses outliving total death, of those terrible reddened arches which for centuries have risen unconquered in procession against the menaces of heaven.
Alone, without near relations, without any ordinary ties, independent of any domestic authority, absolute master of myself and of my goods, I felt most profoundly in that solitude—more than at any other time or place—the sense of my progressive and voluntary evolution towards an ideal Latin type. Day after day I felt my whole nature grow, under the rigorous discipline of meditation, selection, and exclusion; and its special characteristics, its distinct peculiarities, become more marked. The aspect of the country, precise and sober in form and colour, was a continual example and a continual stimulus to me; it had an efficacy for my intellect like that of dogmatic teaching. Each group of lines seemed indeed to be inscribed on the heavens with the pithy significance of an incisive axiom and the unvarying character of a single style.
But the marvellous virtue of this teaching was, that although it drove me to order my inner life with the exactness of a ruled design, it did not dry up the spontaneous springs of emotion and imagination, indeed it only stimulated them to greater activity. Of a sudden, some single thought would become so intense and so ardent within me that it would possess me almost to delirium, like a phantom created by an illusion; and by it my whole world would be strewn with shadows and new lights. A jet of poetry would burst from my inner being, filling my whole soul with music and ineffable freshness, and causing desires and hopes to burn higher in a happy flame. Thus sometimes on the Campagna the autumn sunset would pour out the impalpable lava of its eruption; long sulphur-coloured streams furrowed the uneven plain; the hollows were filled with darkness like abysses just opened; the aqueducts caught fire from base to summit; the whole country seemed to have returned to its volcanic origin in the dawn of time. Thus sometimes in the morning the larks would start suddenly out of the soft sparkling grass, singing as they made their dizzy ascent, like spirits of joy rapt higher and higher from mortal sight into the purest heaven of blue, and to my wondering soul the whole dome of heaven seemed to be echoing with their intoxicating music.
And so this solitude more than any other was able to inspire the degree of enthusiasm and reasonableness necessary for an ambitious ascetic: an ascetic in the original meaning of the austere word, desiring, like the ancient antagonists, to prepare himself by rigid discipline for the struggles and the conquests of the earth.