Those gray headed domestics, too, those faith ful though but nominal vassals, who offered that voluntary reverence with their looks, which his repaid with fatherly affection, while the anguish of a suffering heart hung on his pensive smile, sustained by the firmness of that indignant pride which lowered on his ample brow!
What a picture!
As soon as the first flush of interest, curiosity, and amazement had subsided, my attention was carried towards the altar; and then I thought as I watched the impressive avocation of Father John, that had I been the Prince, I would have been the Caiphas too.
What a religion is this! How finely does it harmonize with the weakness of our nature, how seducingly it speaks to the senses; how forcibly it works on the passions; how strongly it seizes on the imagination; how interesting its forms; how graceful its ceremonies; how awful its rites. What a captivating, what a picturesque faith! Who would not become its proselyte, were it not for the stern opposition of reason, the cold suggestions of philosophy!
The last strain of the vesper hymn died on the air as the sun’s last beam faded on the casements of the chapel; and the Prince and his daughter., to avoid the intrusion of the crowd, withdrew through a private door, which communicated by a ruinous arcade with the castle.
I was the first to leave the chapel, and followed them at a distance as they moved slowly along, their fine figures, sometimes concealed behind a pillar, and again emerging from the transient shade, flushed with the deep suffusion of the crimsoned firmament.
Once they paused, as if to admire the beautiful effect of the retreating light, as it faded on the ocean’s swelling bosom; and once the Princess raised her hand and pointed to the evening star, which rose brilliantly on the deep cerulean blue of a cloudless atmosphere, and shed its fairy beam on the mossy summit of a mouldering turret.
Such were the sublime objects which seemed to engage their attention, and added their sensible inspiration to the fervour of those more abstracted devotions in which they were so recently engaged. At last they reached the portals of the castle, and I lost sight of them. Yet still spellbound, I stood transfixed to the spot from whence I had caught a last view of their receding figures.
While I felt like the victim of superstitious terror when the spectre of its distempered fancy vanishes from its strained and eager gaze, all I had lately seen revolved in my mind like some pictured story of romantic fiction. I cast round my eyes; all still seemed the vision of awakened imagination. Surrounded by a scenery grand even to the boldest majesty of nature, and wild even to desolation—the day’s dying splendours Awfully involving in the gloomy haze of deepening twilight—the gray mists of stealing night gathering on the still faintly illumined surface of the ocean, which, awfully spreading to infinitude, seemed to the limited gaze of human vision to incorporate with the heaven whose last glow it reflected—the rocks, which on every side rose to Alpine elevation, exhibiting, amidst the soft obscurity, forms savagely bold or grotesquely wild; and those finely interesting ruins which spread grandly desolate in the rear, and added a moral interest to the emotions excited by this view of nature in her most awful, most touching aspect.
Thus suddenly withdrawn from the world’s busiest haunts, its hackneyed modes, its vicious pursuits, and unimportant avocations—dropped as it were amidst scenes and mysterious sublimity—alone—on the wildest shores of the greatest ocean of the universe; immersed amidst the decaying monuments of past ages; still viewing in recollection such forms, such manners, such habits (as I had lately beheld,) which to the worldly mind may be well supposed to belong to a race long passed beyond the barrier of existence, with “the years beyond the flood,” I felt like the being of some other sphere newly alighted on a distant orb. While the novel train of thought which stole on my mind, seemed to seize its tone from the awful tranquillity by which I was surrounded, and I remained leaning on the fragment of a rock, as the waves dashed idly against its base, until their dark heads were silvered by the rising moon, and while my eyes dwelt on her silent progress, the castle clock struck nine. Thus warned, I arose to depart, yet not without reluctance. My soul, for the first time, had here held commune with herself; the “lying vanities” of life no longer intoxicating my senses, appeared to me for the first time in their genuine aspect, and my heart still fondly loitered over those scenes of solemn interest, where some of its best feelings had been called into existence.