I must leave these older memories, to tell, so far as it is possible in words, of that land of the idyl which of all enchanted retreats of the imagination is the hardest for him without the secret to enter. Yet here I find it all about me in the places where the poets first unveiled it. Once before I had a sight of it, as all over Italy it glimpses at times from the hills and the campagna. Descending under the high peak of Capri, I heard a flute, and turned and saw on the neighbouring slopes the shepherd-boy leading his flock, the music at his lips. Then the centuries rolled together like a scroll, and I heard the world's morning notes. That was a single moment; but here, day-long is the idyl world. I read the old verses over, and in my walks the song keeps breaking in. The idyls are full of streams and fountains, just such as I meet with wherever I turn, and the water counts in the landscape as in the poems. It is always tumbling over rocks in cascades, brawling with rounded forms among the stones of the shallow brooks, bubbling in fountains, or dripping from the cliff, or shining like silver in the plain. The run that comes down from Mola, the torrent under the olive and lemon branches toward Letojanni, the more open course in the ravine of the mill down by Giardini, the cimeter of the far-seen Alcantara lying on the campagna in the meadows, and that further fiume freddo, the cold stream,—"chill water that for me deep-wooded Etna sends down from the white snow, a draught divine,"—each of these seems inhabited by a genius of its own, so that it does not resemble its neighbours. But all alike murmur of ancient song, and bring it near, and make it real.
On the beach one feels most keenly the actuality of much of the idyls, and finds the continuousness of the human life that enters into them. No idyl appeals so directly to modern feeling, I suspect, as does that of the two fishermen and the dream of the golden fish. Go down to the shore; you will find the old men still at their toil, the same implements, the same poverty, the same sentiment for the heart. Often as I look at them I recall the old words, while the goats hang their heads over the scant herbage, and the blue sea breaks lazily and heavily on the sands.
"Two fishers, on a time, two old men, together lay and slept; they had strewn the dry sea-moss for a bed in their wattled cabin, and there lay against the leafy wall. Beside them wore strewn the instruments of their toilsome bands, the fishing-creels, the rods of reed, the hooks, the sails bedraggled with sea-spoil, the lines, the weels, the lobster-pots woven of rushes, the seines, two oars, and an old cobble upon props. Beneath their heads was a scanty matting, their clothes, their sailors' caps. Here was all their toil, here all their wealth. The threshold had never a door nor a watch-dog. All things, all, to them seemed superfluity, for Poverty was their sentinel; they had no neighbour by them, but ever against their narrow cabin gently floated up the sea."
This is what the eye beholds; and I dare not say that the idyl is touched more with the melancholy of human fate for us than for the poet. Poverty such as this, so absolute, I see everywhere at every hour. It is a terrible sight. It is the physical hunger of the soul in wan limbs and hand, and the fixed gaze of the unhoping eyes—despair made flesh. How long has it suffered here? and was it so when Theocritus saw his fishers and gave them a place in the country of his idyls? He spreads before us the hills and fountains, and fills the scene-with shepherds, and maidens, and laughing loves, and among the rest are these two poor old men. The shadow of the world's poverty falls on this paradise now as then. With the rock and sea it, too, endures.
A few traces of the old myths also survive on the landscape. Not far from here, down the coast, the rocks that the Cyclops threw after the fleeing mariners are still to be seen near the shore above which he piped to Galatea. Some day I mean to take a boat and see them. But now I let the Cyclops idyls go, and with them Adonis of Egypt, and Ptolemy, and the prattling women, and the praises of Hiero, and the deeds of Herakles; these all belong to the cities of the pastoral, to its civilization and art in more conscious forms; but my heart stays in the campagna, where are the song-contests, the amorous praise of maidens, the boyish boasting, the young, sweet, graceful loves. Fain would I recover the breath of that springtime; but while from my foot "every stone upon the way spins singing," make what speed I can, I come not to the harvest-feast. Bees go booming among the blossoms, and the flocks crop their pasture, and night falls with Hesperus; but fruitless on my lips, as at some shrine whence the god is gone, is Bion's prayer: "Hesperus, golden lamp of the lovely daughter of the foam—dear Hesperus, sacred jewel of the deep blue night, dimmer as much than the moon as thou art among the stars preeminent, hail, friend!" Dead now is that ritual. Now more silent than ever is the country-side, missing Daphnis, the flower of all those who sing when the heart is young. Sweet was his flute's first triumph over Menaleas: "Then was the boy glad, and leaped high, and clapped his hands over his victory, as a young fawn leaps about his mother"; but sweeter was the unwon victory when he strove with Damoetas: "Then Damoetas kissed Daphnis, as he ended his song, and he gave Daphnis a pipe, and Daphnis gave him a beautiful flute. Damoetas fluted, and Daphnis piped; the herdsmen, and anon the calves, were dancing in the soft green grass. Neither won the victory, but both were invincible." And him, too, I miss who loved his friend, and wished that they twain might "become a song in the ears of all men unborn," even for their love's sake; and prayed, "Would, O Father Cronides, and would, ye ageless immortals, that this might be, and that when two generations have sped, one might bring these tidings to me by Acheron, the irremeable stream: the loving-kindness that was between thee and thy gracious friend is even now in all men's mouths, and chiefly on the lips of the young." Hill and fountain and pine, the gray sea and Mother Etna, are here; but no children gather in the land, as once about the tomb of Diocles at the coming in of the spring, contending for the prize of the kisses—"Whoso most sweetly touches lip to lip, laden with garlands he returneth to his mother. Happy is he who judges those kisses of the children." Lost over the bright furrows of the sea is Europa riding on the back of the divine bull as Moschus beheld her—"With one hand she clasped the beast's great horn, and with the other caught up the purple fold of her garment, lest it might trail and be wet in the hoar sea's infinite spray"; and from the border-land of mythic story, that was then this world's horizon, yet more faintly the fading voice of Hylas answers the deep-throated shout of Herakles. Faint now as his voice are the voices of the shepherds who are gone, youth and maiden and children; dimly I see them, vaguely I hear them; at last there remains only "the hoar sea's infinite spray." And will you say it was in truth all a dream? Were the poor fisherman in their toil alone real, and the rest airy nothings to whom Sicily gave a local habitation and a name? It was Virgil's dream and Spenser's; and some secret there was—something still in our breasts—that made it immortal, so that to name the Sicilian Muses is to stir an infinite, longing tenderness in every young and noble heart that the gods have softened with sweet thoughts.
And here I shut in my pages the one laurel leaf that Taormina bore. She, too, in her centuries has had her poet. Perhaps none who will see these words ever gave a thought to the name and fame of Cornelius Severus. Few of his works remain, and little is known of his life. He is said to have been the friend of Pollio, and to have been present in the Sicilian war between Augustus and Sextus Pompey. He wrote the first book of an epic poem on that subject, so excellent that it has been thought that, had the entire work been continued at the same level, he would have held the second place among the Latin epic poets. He wrote also heroic songs, of which fragments survive, one of which is an elegy upon Cicero, which Seneca quotes, saying of him, "No one out of so many talented men deplored the death of Cicero better than Cornelius Severus." Some dialogues in verse also seem to have been written by him. These fragments may not he easily obtained. But take down your Virgil; and, if it be like this of mine which I brought from Rome, you will find at the very end, last of the shorter pieces ascribed to the poet, one of the length of a book of the "Georgics," called "Etna." This is the work of Cornelius Severus. An early death took from him the perfection of his genius and the hope of fame; but happy was the fortune of him who wrote so well that for centuries his lines were thought not unworthy of Virgil, whose name still shields this Taorminian verse from oblivion.
VII
It is my last day at Taormina. I have seen the sunrise from my old station by the Greek temple, and watched the throng of cattle and men gathered on the distant beach of Letojanni and darkening the broad bed of the dry torrent that there makes down to the sea, and I wished I were among them, for it is their annual fair; and still I dwell on every feature of the landscape that familiarity has made more beautiful. The afternoon I have dedicated to a walk to Mola. It is a pleasant, easy climb, with the black ancient wall of the city on the left, where it goes up the face of the castle-rock, and on the right the deep ravine, closed by Monte Venere in the west. All is very quiet; a silent, silent country! There are few birds or none, and indeed I have heard no bird-song since I have been here. Opposite, on the other side of the wall of the ravine, are some cows hanging in strange fashion to the cliff, where it seems goats could hardly cling; but the unwieldy, awkward creatures move with sure feet, and seem wholly at home, pasturing on the bare precipice. I cannot hear the torrent, now a narrow stream, deep below me, but I see the women of Mola washing by the old fountain which is its source. There is no other sign of human life. The fresh spring flowers, large and coarse, but bright-coloured, are all I have of company, and the sky is blue and the air like crystal. So I go up, ever up, and at last am by the gate of Mola, and enter the stony-hearted town. A place more dreary, desolate to the eye, is seldom seen. There are only low, mean houses of gray stone, and the paved ways. If you can fancy a prison turned inside out like a glove, with all its interior stone exposed to the sunlight, which yet seems sunlight in a prison, and silence over all—that is Mola. The ruins of the fortress are near the gate on the highest point of the crag. Within is a barren spot—a cistern, old foundations, and some broken walls. Look over the battlement westward, and you will see a precipice that one thinks only birds could assail; and, observing how isolated is the crag on all sides, you will understand what an inaccessible fastness this was, and cannot be surprised at its record of defence.
Perhaps here was the oldest dwelling-place of man upon the hill, and it was the securest retreat. Monsignore, indeed, believes that Ham, the son of Noah, who drove Japhet out of Sicily, was the first builder; but I do not doubt its antiquity was very great, and it seems likely that this was the original Siculian stronghold before the coming of the Greeks, and the building of the lower city of Taormina. The ruins that exist are part of the fortress made by that governor who lost the city to the Saracens, to defend it against them on this side; and here it stood for nigh a thousand years, like the citadel itself, an impregnable hold of war. It seldom yielded, and always by treachery or mutiny; for more than once, when Taormina was sacked, its citadel and Mola remained untaken and unconquerable on their extreme heights. I shall not tell its story; but one brave man once commanded here, and his name shall be its fame now, and my last tale of the Taorminian past.