For Tully's self, with Hermes by his side,
Recross'd the Stygian flood, when Bembo died."
Such as may be gathered from these productions and occupations, and from her own subsequent reminiscences, were Olympia's thoughts and views of life and death up to this her twenty–first year. To her, indeed, whose being had as yet been stirred by no deeper feeling than gratified love of approbation, congenial friendship, and enthusiasm for her favourite studies, the age in which she was living might have appeared one of "renaissance," as it has since been discovered to have been. Not because she was able to look out far, but because her view was as yet so circumscribed. The social earthquake which was heaving the world around her, had not yet awakened her from her dream–life among "the haunts of the Muses."
CHANGES AT HAND.
Her talk with Lavinia della Rovere on the great topics which were agitating the world, election, grace, free will, and justification, was only such as may serve curiously to indicate how thoroughly the general mind must have been saturated with speculations on such subjects, when two girls, neither of them feeling strongly on the matter, could not meet and make friends without diversifying their Boccaccio readings and Ciceronian studies with chat on the difficulties of predestination. The outside air must have been very highly charged with an electricity of thought that boded stormful changes. For the meeting and shock of large masses of human thought always is a portent indicating that much change is at hand. Absence of much thought is an indispensable condition of stability.
But the time was now come when Olympia was to be waked from her Helicon dreams, and to be summoned very suddenly to descend from her calm Parnassus heights, step out into this storm–atmosphere, and find herself under circumstances wholly unknown to "Apollo and the Æonian maids."