Which warns me with its stillness, to forsake
Earth’s troubled waters for a purer spring.
This quiet sail is as a noiseless wing
To waft me from distraction. Once I loved
Torn ocean’s roar, but thy soft murmuring
Sounds sweet as if a sister’s voice reproved
That I with stern delights should e’er have been so moved.”
Shelley’s second wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, was with her husband, and about the English party collected a jovial company of both sexes for whom the Diodati homestead was the rendezvous. At the close of the year they journeyed southward to Ravenna, to Pisa and to Spezzia, near which latter place Shelley and Williams were drowned.
The old house is very peaceful now in restored respectability. A very Quaker of a campagne, in faded dove-color and broad-brimmed roof, it is square-built like Ferney, and without tower or battlement. So English is its expression of home-comfort in spacious rooms, spreading lawn and clumps of shade-trees, that Byron must have had recalled to him continually the land he affected to despise and hate.
In the Spring, we found our earliest primroses in the Diodati grounds. We had never seen them growing wild before, and emulous parties sallied forth, every day, for fresh spoils of these and the fragrant purple violets, unknown to American fields. A week later, the meadows upon the left bank of the lake were yellow as gold with them. But on the day of my first primrose-hunt they had just begun to show their straw-colored faces, and so tentatively that our quest had to be close and keen. We—two of us—strayed into the grounds of a closed country-house on a warm March afternoon, not sanguine of success after the assurances of sundry laborers and rosy-cheeked nurses whom we had met and catechized, that “les primevères” were never found thereabouts. The day before, two of “our girls” had come in to five o’clock tea, with handfuls of the pale beauties picked in the Diodati woods, so we knew they were above-ground. The lawn chosen by my friend J—— and myself, as the scene of our trespass, was level and open to the sun, except where branchy limes and tent-like chestnuts made cool retreats for the “summer-days a-coming.” The turf was so deep, our feet sank into it, so elastic, it was a joy to tread it. We had gone perhaps twenty yards from the entrance-gates when something smiled up suddenly at us, as if it had, that instant, broken ground. We were down upon our knees in a second, tugging so hard at the prize that the tender stems snapped close to the flowers. Then, perceiving that the stalks were long as well as frail, we dug down through the turf with our gloved fingers, parasol-handles, hair-pins—anything that might penetrate to the root. Not a stick was visible upon the neat lawn. Being only two women, we had not a pocket-knife between us. I would not declare that we would not have used our teeth had nothing better offered, so excited were we over our treasure-trove. They shone at us above the sward on all sides, after we espied that one cluster. The depth of the roots below the surface is amazing. Our digging and scraping assumed the dignity of scientific excavations by the time we had filled handkerchiefs and veils.