It was the moon.
Slowly it rose. The Milky Way grew pale in the lake, and one great star which had twinkled like a will-o'-the-wisp among the reeds went out. The light grew and gathered behind the hills, and at last the miracle of moonrise came to us as we waited in the scented darkness of Thrasymene's shore, as it came to the young world on the eve of its creation. First the rim, and then the pulsing globe leaping from the shadows. For a moment it hung upon the hillside while two fantastic stone-pines, a fraction of an inch in height, swayed within its circle like neophytes bowing before Diana; then it rose into the heavens,—a stately ship steering among the stars.
Lake Thrasymene.
A miracle no less because our darkness has been lightened thus since the beginning of the world. There are so many miracles every day, if we but knew them,—the scent of flowers, the webs of spiders, the subtle fragrance of the earth, a wayside weed, and, most beautiful of all, the sunrise and the moon. For sunsets, though they may fill a grey world with rose and gold, and though they are always so magnificent that words are pallid pictures and artists' colours impotent, never have the beauty of the dawn. A sunset may turn our joy to melancholy, so tender is it, so pregnant with regret for the vanished day, so full of splendours. But we are always happy in the dawn. What of the night? It is over and gone. A new world lies at our feet; a new beauty fills our eyes; the breath of the morning in our nostrils is as a flower after rain. For in the dawn we step from the valley of the Shadow of Death on to the rosy mountains of Hope.
And because you are in Italy you have time to notice these miracles of every day, time to be happy, time to watch things grow. The hours do not matter, for to-morrow is as yesterday, and to-day is but a little minute in a garden. If it should rain the butterflies will only seek their shelter, the cicalas will be still, and the pores of the thirsty earth will open. To-morrow the sun will shine again. Or the day after that.
Nor is Passignano devoid of interest for the sightseer whose pleasure is not to be found in green pastures or beside still waters. Magione, with its three mediaeval castles and its memory of the Baglioni, is within a drive. Picturesque Castiglione del Lago is well worth a visit. There is the island of St. Francis, with its ruined convent, now the villeggiatura of an Italian nobleman, and its exquisite views of Montepulciano. And lastly, there is the battle-field where Hannibal, the 'furious youth' of Publius Cornelius Scipio, defeated Flaminius, the maker of roads.
We did not go to Magione, but we let two old men of Passignano row us to St. Francis' Island in their weather-beaten fishing-boats. In an acacia grove down by the water's edge they showed us the block of stone whose surface was worn into two hollows by the knees of St. Francis. So they would have us believe. 'Ma, è vero!' they exclaimed, as though they feared that we should doubt them; and we could but smile as they told us an old legend of the saint sailing miraculously across Thrasymene on his mantle, bearing a lighted candle in his hand, because the boatmen dared not put out in the tramontana which was lashing the waters to fury.