“E il ricettacolo delle virtù sarà pieno di sogni e vane speranze.”
Leonardo da Vinci.
The hour which preceded my arrival in the ancestral garden, where they awaited me, seems to me—as I see it in imagination—illuminated with a light of unaccustomed poetry.
To him who knows what slow or sudden fertilisations, what unexpected transfigurations, are possible to an intense soul communicating with other souls in the vicissitudes of this most uncertain life—to him for whom the whole dignity of existence lies in exerting or submitting to a moral force, and who approaches his kind with a secret anxiety to dominate or be dominated—to every man who is curious about the inner mystery, who is ambitious of spiritual power, or feels the need of slavery, no hour has such a charm as that in which he moves forward, with a vague anticipation, to meet the living Unknown and Infinite, a dim world which he will either conquer, or by which he will be absorbed.
I was about to enter an enclosed garden. There the three virgin princesses were awaiting the friend who had been absent so long, him to whom, as their contemporary in age, they were bound by recollections of childhood and adolescence, him who was sole heir to a name no less ancient and distinguished than their own. And thus they were awaiting the return of an equal, of a sojourner in great cities, one who should bring them a breath of that larger life which they had renounced.
And each one of them perhaps in her secret heart was awaiting the Bridegroom.
This time of waiting appears to me vehement in its anxiety when I think of the bare and gloomy solitude of the house in which, until that day, they had languished, their beautiful hands overflowing with the treasures of youth, surrounded by a phantom pomp of existence called up by their mother’s delirium to people the emptiness of the vast mirrors. There, as if in twilight pools, the raving soul of the mother was wont to be immersed. On the infinite distance of those colourless expanses, had not each one of the maidens beheld the apparition of the youthful, ardent figure of the Bridegroom who was to tear her from this obscure decay, and carry her away in a whirlwind of delight?
Thus each one waited anxiously within her enclosed garden for the coming of him who was only after all to delude her, to watch her perish without possessing her.
“Ah! which of us will be the elect?”