“O beautiful, divine light,” she continued, “what a loss! O, to think that one day I must lose you for ever! At home I used to lie awake at night longing for the morning, and crying out for the god of day. It was like choice wine to me, a cup of Chian, the first streaks of the Aurora, and I could hardly bear his bright coming, when he came to me like Semele, for rapture. How gloriously did he shoot over the hills! and then anon he rested awhile on the snowy summit of Olympus, as in some luminous shrine, gladdening the Phrygian plain. Fair, bright-haired god! thou art my worship, if Callista worships aught: but somehow I worship nothing now. I am weary.”
“Well,” said her brother in a soothing tone, “it is a change. That light, elastic air, that transparent heaven, that fresh temperate breeze, that majestic sea! Africa is not Greece; O, the difference! That’s it, Callista; it is the nostalgia; you are home-sick.”
“It may be so,” she said; “I do not well know [pg 119]what I would have. Yes, the poisonous dews, the heavy heat, the hideous beasts, the green fever-gendering swamps. This vast thickly-wooded plain, like some mysterious labyrinth, oppresses and disquiets me with its very richness. The luxuriant foliage, the tall, rank plants, the deep, close lanes, I do not see my way through them, and I pant for breath. I only breathe freely on this hill. O, how unlike Greece, with the clear, soft, delicate colouring of its mountains, and the pure azure or the purple of its waters!”
“But, my dear Callista,” interrupted her brother, “recollect you are not in those oppressive, gloomy forests, but in Sicca, and no one asks you to penetrate them. And if you want mountains, I think those on the horizon are bare enough.”
“And the race of man,” she continued, “is worse than all. Where is the genius of our bright land? where its intelligence, playfulness, grace, and noble bearing? Here hearts are as black as brows, and smiles as treacherous as the adders of the wood. The natives are crafty and remorseless; they never relax; they have no cheerfulness or mirth; their very love is a furnace, and their sole ecstasy is revenge.”
“No country like home to any of us,” said Aristo; “yet here you are. Habit would be a second nature if you were here long enough; your feelings would become acclimated, and would find a new home. People get to like the darkness of the extreme north in course of time. The painted Britons, the Cimmerians, the Hyperboreans, are content never to see the [pg 120]sun at all, which is your god. Here your own god reigns; why quarrel with him?”
“The sun of Greece is light,” answered Callista; “the sun of Africa is fire. I am no fire-worshipper.”
“I suspect even Styx and Phlegethon are tolerable, at length,” said her brother, “if Phlegethon and Styx there be, as the poets tell us.”
“The cold, foggy Styx is the north,” said Callista, “and the south is the scorching, blasting Phlegethon, and Greece, clear, sweet, and sunny, is the Elysian fields.” And she continued her improvisations:—
“Where are the islands of the blest?