SHELLEY
Above my head in the starry July night goes with soft, swift, silent movement through the scented air, above the tall leaves of the aloes, and under the green boughs of the acacias, a little brown owl. Families of them live on the roof of this great house, and at sunset they descend and begin hunting for crickets and moths and water-beetles and mice. These owls are called, in scientific nomenclature, the scops carniola; to the peasantry they are known as the chiu; by Shelley they were called the aziola. I have never found any Italian who called this owl aziola, but I suppose that Mary Godwin did, since she said, ‘Do you not hear the aziola cry?’ And Shelley made answer, very truly, of this cry, that it was music heard,—
‘By wood and stream, meadow and mountain side,
And fields and marshes wide,—
Such as nor voice, nor lute, nor wind, nor bird
The soul ever stirred.’
The note is very far-reaching, deep and sweet, clear and melodious, one single note sounding at intervals of thirty or forty seconds through the still air of the summer night. It is said to be a love call, but I doubt it, for it may be heard long after the pairing season; the bird gives it forth when he is flying as when he is sitting still, and it is unmistakably a note of contentment. Nor do I think it is sad, as Shelley terms it; it has a sound as of pleased meditation in it, and it has a mellow thrill which, once heard, cannot be forgotten ever. For myself, never do I hear the call of the chiu (which is often heard from May time until autumn, when these birds migrate to the East) without remembering Shelley and wishing that he lived to hear.
He is more truly a son of Italy than any one of her own poets, for he had the sentiment and passion of her natural beauty, which cannot be said of the greatest of them. Neither he nor Byron can be well comprehended by those who are not intimately acquainted with Italian landscape. The exceeding truthfulness of their observation of, and feeling for, it cannot certainly be appreciated except by those who have lived amongst the sights and sounds which took so close a hold upon their imagination and their heart.
Byron must have often ridden over the firm, smooth, yellow shores of the sea beyond Pisa, for he lived some time in the peaceful city dedicated to St Ranier, and probably both he and Shelley spent many hours many a time in a wood I know well, which follows the line of the sea for sixteen miles, and is many miles in depth. On the shore, pines, rooted in drifted sand half a mile broad, stand between the deciduous trees and the sea beach, and protect them from the violence of the westerly winds; when you are half a mile inland, you leave the pines and find ilex, acacia, beech, holly, juniper, and many aspen and other forest trees. Here the wood-dove, the goldfinch, the nuthatch, the woodpecker, the jay and the cuckoo dwell; here the grassy paths lead down dusky green aisles of foliage, fringed with dog-roses, where one may roam at pleasure all the day long, and meet nothing living beside the birds, except sometimes a stoat or a fox; here the flag-lily and the sword-rush grow in the reedy pools, and the song of the nightingale may be heard in perfection; its nests are made in numbers under the bracken, amongst the gorse and in the impenetrable thickets of the marucca and the heather. These woods are still entirely wild and natural, and they are rarely invaded except by the oxen or buffaloes drawing waggons to be filled with cut furze and dead branches by the rough and picturesque families who sit aloft on the giddy heights of these sylvan loads. But these invaders are few and far between, and in spring and summer these forest lands are as still and solitary as they certainly were when the poets wandered through them, listening to the sea-breeze sighing through the trees.
No one, I repeat, can fully appreciate the fineness and accuracy of observation and description of both Byron and Shelley who does not know Italy well; not with the pretended knowledge of the social hordes who come to its cities for court, and embassy, and gallery, and tea party, but such knowledge as can alone be gained by long and familiar intimacy with its remote and solitary places.