And yet there was a special fitness in our pilgrimage to the Pineta on September 14th, which is the anniversary of his death; for if the spirit of this wayfarer lingered anywhere upon the eastern shores of Italy it must have flown to the 'celestial forest' in which, in visions, he beheld his Beatrice walk amid the white-robed companies of heaven.
Autumn had laid her hand upon the poet's paradise. The earth was carpeted with pine-needles, soft and rusty, and pied with flowers,—scabious and yellow thistles, veronica and cinquefoil, and Michaelmas daisies. Great bunches of scarlet fruits encarnadined the undergrowth. The bramble leaves were rose and russet; the Pilgrim-trees were hung with crimson tassels; the yews were thick with purple berries. Evening primroses grew so tall that they were reflected in the water among the blossoming reeds. And everywhere the ethereal webs of cow-parsley, those loveliest flowers of the field, were spun on slender stems as delicately as frost upon a spider's web. Moon-flowers I call them, dust o' the moon, and when they fade they fold their treasures up into a knitted purse of green and gold, swaying heavy-headed in every hedge.
The air was warm and fragrant, like the scented breath of some one beautiful. Beneath our feet the timid lizard darted to the shadows; the birds made music in the pines, and all around we heard the shrill chorus of frogs and the rapturous song of the cicala. Driftwood and fallen leaves floated slowly to the sea, on just such a shadowed stream as that by which Dante beheld Matilda:—
'A lady all alone, who, singing, went,
And culling flower from flower, wherewith her way
Was all o'er painted.'[23]
And all was still, save where a snake made a ripple that you could hear as it swam neck-high through the water.
A paradise indeed!
On our way back across the rice-fields and flowery marshes, which cover the fallen city of Caesarea, we passed the mouldering column marking the spot where Gaston de Foix fell in the battle of Ravenna. It stands on a causeway above a sluggish river, in an esedra of cypresses which whisper melancholy to the wind. All the world knows his lovely broken tomb, whose effigy is one of the treasures of the Milan Museum, but in Ravenna itself there is another tomb of just such another boy—Guidarello Guidarelli. A warrior of Ravenna it is named, but there is no stone to mark the place where fell this Knight of the beautiful face, 'dear at once to Mars and to Minerva,' who followed the fortunes of Cesare Borgia, and met his death by treachery in Imola.
RAVENNA: THE COLUMN OF GASTON DE FOIX.