I am the solemn Night![379]
[The howling of the wind at night had a very peculiar effect on her nerves—nothing in the least approaching to the sensation of fear, as few were more exempt from that class of alarms usually called nervous; but working upon her imagination to a degree which was always succeeded by a reaction of fatigue and exhaustion. The solemn influences thus mysteriously exercised are alluded to in many of her poems, particularly “The Song of the Night,” and “The Voice of the Wind.”—Memoir, p. 84.]
[378] Suggested by Thorwaldsen’s bas-relief of Night, represented under the form of a winged female figure, with two infants asleep in her arms.
[379] Pietro Mulier, called Il Tempesta, from his surprising pictures of storms. “His compositions,” says Lanzi, “inspire a real horror, presenting to our eyes death-devoted ships overtaken by tempests and darkness—fired by lightning—now rising on the mountain-wave, and again submerged in the abyss of ocean.” During an imprisonment of five years in Genoa, the pictures which he painted in his dungeon were marked by additional power and gloom.—See Lanzi’s History of Painting, translated by Roscoe.
THE STORM-PAINTER IN HIS DUNGEON.
“Where of ye, O tempests, is the goal?
Are ye like those that shake the human breast?
Or do ye find at length, like eagles, some high nest?”
Childe Harold.
Midnight, and silence deep!