"With fairest flowers,
Whilst summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele—"
WHEN I removed into the
country, it was to occupy an old-fashioned farm-house,
which had no piazza—a deficiency the more regretted,
because not only did I like piazzas, as somehow combining
the coziness of in-doors with the freedom of out-doors,
and it is so pleasant to inspect your thermometer there,
but the country round about was such a picture, that in
berry time no boy climbs hill or crosses vale without
coming upon easels planted in every nook, and sun-burnt
painters painting there. A very paradise of painters. The
circle of the stars cut by the circle of the mountains. At
least, so looks it from the house; though, once upon the
mountains, no circle of them can you see. Had the site
been chosen five rods off, this charmed ring would not
have been.
The house is old. Seventy
years since, from the heart of the Hearth Stone Hills,
they quarried the Kaaba, or Holy Stone, to which, each
Thanksgiving, the social pilgrims used to come. So long
ago, that, in digging for the foundation, the workmen used
both spade and axe, fighting the Troglodytes of those
subterranean parts—sturdy roots of a sturdy wood,
encamped upon what is now a long land-slide of sleeping
meadow, sloping away off from my poppy-bed. Of that knit
wood, but one survivor stands—an elm, lonely through
steadfastness.
Whoever built the house,
he builded better than he knew; or else Orion in the
zenith flashed down his Damocles' sword to him some starry
night, and said, "Build there." For how,
otherwise, could it have entered the builder's mind, that,
upon the clearing being made, such a purple prospect would
be his?—nothing less than Greylock, with all his hills
about him, like Charlemagne among his peers.
Now, for a house, so
situated in such a country, to have no piazza for the
convenience of those who might desire to feast upon the
view, and take their time and ease about it, seemed as
much of an omission as if a picture-gallery should have no
bench; for what but picture-galleries are the marble halls
of these same limestone hills?—galleries hung, month
after month anew, with pictures ever fading into pictures
ever fresh. And beauty is like piety—you cannot run and
read it; tranquillity and constancy, with, now-a-days, an
easy chair, are needed. For though, of old, when reverence
was in vogue, and indolence was not, the devotees of
Nature, doubtless, used to stand and adore—just as, in
the cathedrals of those ages, the worshipers of a higher
Power did—yet, in these times of failing faith and
feeble knees, we have the piazza and the pew.
During the first year of
my residence, the more leisurely to witness the coronation
of Charlemagne (weather permitting, they crown him every
sunrise and sunset), I chose me, on the hill-side bank
near by, a royal lounge of turf—a green velvet lounge,
with long, moss-padded back; while at the head, strangely
enough, there grew (but, I suppose, for heraldry) three
tufts of blue violets in a field-argent of wild
strawberries; and a trellis, with honeysuckle, I set for
canopy. Very majestical lounge, indeed. So much so, that
here, as with the reclining majesty of Denmark in his
orchard, a sly ear-ache invaded me. But, if damps abound
at times in Westminster Abbey, because it is so old, why
not within this monastery of mountains, which is older?
A piazza must be had.
The house was wide—my
fortune narrow; so that, to build a panoramic piazza, one
round and round, it could not be—although, indeed,
considering the matter by rule and square, the carpenters,
in the kindest way, were anxious to gratify my furthest
wishes, at I've forgotten how much a foot.
Upon but one of the four
sides would prudence grant me what I wanted. Now, which
side?
To the east, that long
camp of the Hearth Stone Hills, fading far away towards
Quito; and every fall, a small white flake of something
peering suddenly, of a coolish morning, from the topmost
cliff—the season's new-dropped lamb, its earliest
fleece; and then the Christmas dawn, draping those dun
highlands with red-barred plaids and tartans—goodly
sight from your piazza, that. Goodly sight; but, to the
north is Charlemagne—can't have the Hearth Stone Hills
with Charlemagne.
Well, the south side.
Apple-trees are there. Pleasant, of a balmy morning, in
the month of May, to sit and see that orchard,
white-budded, as for a bridal; and, in October, one green
arsenal yard; such piles of ruddy shot. Very fine, I
grant; but, to the north is Charlemagne.
The west side, look. An
upland pasture, alleying away into a maple wood at top.
Sweet, in opening spring, to trace upon the hill-side,
otherwise gray and bare—to trace, I say, the oldest
paths by their streaks of earliest green. Sweet, indeed, I
can't deny; but, to the north is Charlemagne.
So Charlemagne, he
carried it. It was not long after 1848; and, somehow,
about that time, all round the world, these kings, they
had the casting vote, and voted for themselves.
No sooner was ground
broken, than all the neighborhood, neighbor Dives, in
particular, broke, too—into a laugh. Piazza to the
north! Winter piazza! Wants, of winter midnights, to watch
the Aurora Borealis, I suppose; hope he's laid in good
store of Polar muffs and mittens.
That was in the lion
month of March. Not forgotten are the blue noses of the
carpenters, and how they scouted at the greenness of the
cit, who would build his sole piazza to the north. But
March don't last forever; patience, and August comes. And
then, in the cool elysium of my northern bower, I, Lazarus
in Abraham's bosom, cast down the hill a pitying glance on
poor old Dives, tormented in the purgatory of his piazza
to the south.
But, even in December,
this northern piazza does not repel—nipping cold and
gusty though it be, and the north wind, like any miller,
bolting by the snow, in finest flour—for then, once
more, with frosted beard, I pace the sleety deck,
weathering Cape Horn.
In summer, too, Canute-like,
sitting here, one is often reminded of the sea. For not
only do long ground-swells roll the slanting grain, and
little wavelets of the grass ripple over upon the low
piazza, as their beach, and the blown down of dandelions
is wafted like the spray, and the purple of the mountains
is just the purple of the billows, and a still August noon
broods upon the deep meadows, as a calm upon the Line; but
the vastness and the lonesomeness are so oceanic, and the
silence and the sameness, too, that the first peep of a
strange house, rising beyond the trees, is for all the
world like spying, on the Barbary coast, an unknown sail.
And this recalls my
inland voyage to fairyland. A true voyage; but, take it
all in all, interesting as if invented.
From the piazza, some
uncertain object I had caught, mysteriously snugged away,
to all appearance, in a sort of purpled breast-pocket,
high up in a hopper-like hollow, or sunken angle, among
the northwestern mountains—yet, whether, really, it was
on a mountain-side, or a mountain-top, could not be
determined; because, though, viewed from favorable points,
a blue summit, peering up away behind the rest, will, as
it were, talk to you over their heads, and plainly tell
you, that, though he (the blue summit) seems among them,
he is not of them (God forbid!), and, indeed, would have
you know that he considers himself—as, to say truth, he
has good right—by several cubits their superior,
nevertheless, certain ranges, here and there double-filed,
as in platoons, so shoulder and follow up upon one
another, with their irregular shapes and heights, that,
from the piazza, a nigher and lower mountain will, in most
states of the atmosphere, effacingly shade itself away
into a higher and further one; that an object, bleak on
the former's crest, will, for all that, appear nested in
the latter's flank. These mountains, somehow, they play at
hide-and-seek, and all before one's eyes.
But, be that as it may,
the spot in question was, at all events, so situated as to
be only visible, and then but vaguely, under certain
witching conditions of light and shadow.
Indeed, for a year or
more, I knew not there was such a spot, and might,
perhaps, have never known, had it not been for a wizard
afternoon in autumn—late in autumn—a mad poet's
afternoon; when the turned maple woods in the broad basin
below me, having lost their first vermilion tint, dully
smoked, like smouldering towns, when flames expire upon
their prey; and rumor had it, that this smokiness in the
general air was not all Indian summer—which was not used
to be so sick a thing, however mild—but, in great part,
was blown from far-off forests, for weeks on fire, in
Vermont; so that no wonder the sky was ominous as Hecate's
cauldron—and two sportsmen, crossing a red stubble
buck-wheat field, seemed guilty Macbeth and foreboding
Banquo; and the hermit-sun, hutted in an Adullum cave,
well towards the south, according to his season, did
little else but, by indirect reflection of narrow rays
shot down a Simplon pass among the clouds, just steadily
paint one small, round, strawberry mole upon the wan cheek
of northwestern hills. Signal as a candle. One spot of
radiance, where all else was shade.
Fairies there, thought I;
some haunted ring where fairies dance.
Time passed; and the
following May, after a gentle shower upon the
mountains—a little shower islanded in misty seas of
sunshine; such a distant shower—and sometimes two, and
three, and four of them, all visible together in different
parts—as I love to watch from the piazza, instead of
thunder storms, as I used to, which wrap old Greylock,
like a Sinai, till one thinks swart Moses must be climbing
among scathed hemlocks there; after, I say, that gentle
shower, I saw a rainbow, resting its further end just
where, in autumn, I had marked the mole. Fairies there,
thought I; remembering that rainbows bring out the blooms,
and that, if one can but get to the rainbow's end, his
fortune is made in a bag of gold. Yon rainbow's end, would
I were there, thought I. And none the less I wished it,
for now first noticing what seemed some sort of glen, or
grotto, in the mountain side; at least, whatever it was,
viewed through the rainbow's medium, it glowed like the
Potosi mine. But a work-a-day neighbor said, no doubt it
was but some old barn—an abandoned one, its broadside
beaten in, the acclivity its background. But I, though I
had never been there, I knew better.
A few days after, a
cheery sunrise kindled a golden sparkle in the same spot
as before. The sparkle was of that vividness, it seemed as
if it could only come from glass. The building, then—if
building, after all, it was—could, at least, not be a
barn, much less an abandoned one; stale hay ten years
musting in it. No; if aught built by mortal, it must be a
cottage; perhaps long vacant and dismantled, but this very
spring magically fitted up and glazed.
Again, one noon, in the
same direction, I marked, over dimmed tops of terraced
foliage, a broader gleam, as of a silver buckler, held
sunwards over some croucher's head; which gleam,
experience in like cases taught, must come from a roof
newly shingled. This, to me, made pretty sure the recent
occupancy of that far cot in fairy land.
Day after day, now, full
of interest in my discovery, what time I could spare from
reading the Midsummer's Night Dream, and all about Titania,
wishfully I gazed off towards the hills; but in vain.
Either troops of shadows, an imperial guard, with slow
pace and solemn, defiled along the steeps; or, routed by
pursuing light, fled broadcast from east to west—old
wars of Lucifer and Michael; or the mountains, though
unvexed by these mirrored sham fights in the sky, had an
atmosphere otherwise unfavorable for fairy views. I was
sorry; the more so, because I had to keep my chamber for
some time after—which chamber did not face those hills.
At length, when pretty
well again, and sitting out, in the September morning,
upon the piazza, and thinking to myself, when, just after
a little flock of sheep, the farmer's banded children
passed, a-nutting, and said, "How sweet a
day"—it was, after all, but what their fathers call
a weather-breeder—and, indeed, was become so sensitive
through my illness, as that I could not bear to look upon
a Chinese creeper of my adoption, and which, to my
delight, climbing a post of the piazza, had burst out in
starry bloom, but now, if you removed the leaves a little,
showed millions of strange, cankerous worms, which,
feeding upon those blossoms, so shared their blessed hue,
as to make it unblessed evermore—worms, whose germs had
doubtless lurked in the very bulb which, so hopefully, I
had planted: in this ingrate peevishness of my weary
convalescence, was I sitting there; when, suddenly looking
off, I saw the golden mountain-window, dazzling like a
deep-sea dolphin. Fairies there, thought I, once more; the
queen of fairies at her fairy-window; at any rate, some
glad mountain-girl; it will do me good, it will cure this
weariness, to look on her. No more; I'll launch my
yawl—ho, cheerly, heart! and push away for
fairy-land—for rainbow's end, in fairy-land.
How to get to fairy-land,
by what road, I did not know; nor could any one inform me;
not even one Edmund Spenser, who had been there—so he
wrote me—further than that to reach fairy-land, it must
be voyaged to, and with faith. I took the fairy-mountain's
bearings, and the first fine day, when strength permitted,
got into my yawl—high-pommeled, leather one—cast off
the fast, and away I sailed, free voyager as an autumn
leaf. Early dawn; and, sallying westward, I sowed the
morning before me.
Some miles brought me
nigh the hills; but out of present sight of them. I was
not lost; for road-side golden-rods, as guide-posts,
pointed, I doubted not, the way to the golden window.
Following them, I came to a lone and languid region, where
the grass-grown ways were traveled but by drowsy cattle,
that, less waked than stirred by day, seemed to walk in
sleep. Browse, they did not—the enchanted never eat. At
least, so says Don Quixote, that sagest sage that ever
lived.
On I went, and gained at
last the fairy mountain's base, but saw yet no fairy ring.
A pasture rose before me. Letting down five mouldering
bars—so moistly green, they seemed fished up from some
sunken wreck—a wigged old Aries, long-visaged, and with
crumpled horn, came snuffing up; and then, retreating,
decorously led on along a milky-way of white-weed, past
dim-clustering Pleiades and Hyades, of small
forget-me-nots; and would have led me further still his
astral path, but for golden flights of
yellow-birds—pilots, surely, to the golden window, to
one side flying before me, from bush to bush, towards deep
woods—which woods themselves were luring—and, somehow,
lured, too, by their fence, banning a dark road, which,
however dark, led up. I pushed through; when Aries,
renouncing me now for some lost soul, wheeled, and went
his wiser way. Forbidding and forbidden ground—to him.
A winter wood road,
matted all along with winter-green. By the side of pebbly
waters—waters the cheerier for their solitude; beneath
swaying fir-boughs, petted by no season, but still green
in all, on I journeyed—my horse and I; on, by an old
saw-mill, bound down and hushed with vines, that his
grating voice no more was heard; on, by a deep flume clove
through snowy marble, vernal-tinted, where freshet eddies
had, on each side, spun out empty chapels in the living
rock; on, where Jacks-in-the-pulpit, like their Baptist
namesake, preached but to the wilderness; on, where a
huge, cross-grain block, fern-bedded, showed where, in
forgotten times, man after man had tried to split it, but
lost his wedges for his pains—which wedges yet rusted in
their holes; on, where, ages past, in step-like ledges of
a cascade, skull-hollow pots had been churned out by
ceaseless whirling of a flintstone—ever wearing, but
itself unworn; on, by wild rapids pouring into a secret
pool, but soothed by circling there awhile, issued forth
serenely; on, to less broken ground, and by a little ring,
where, truly, fairies must have danced, or else some
wheel-tire been heated—for all was bare; still on, and
up, and out into a hanging orchard, where maidenly looked
down upon me a crescent moon, from morning.
My horse hitched low his
head. Red apples rolled before him; Eve's apples;
seek-no-furthers. He tasted one, I another; it tasted of
the ground. Fairy land not yet, thought I, flinging my
bridle to a humped old tree, that crooked out an arm to
catch it. For the way now lay where path was none, and
none might go but by himself, and only go by daring.
Through blackberry brakes that tried to pluck me back,
though I but strained towards fruitless growths of
mountain-laurel; up slippery steeps to barren heights,
where stood none to welcome. Fairy land not yet, thought
I, though the morning is here before me.
Foot-sore enough and
weary, I gained not then my journey's end, but came ere
long to a craggy pass, dipping towards growing regions
still beyond. A zigzag road, half overgrown with blueberry
bushes, here turned among the cliffs. A rent was in their
ragged sides; through it a little track branched off,
which, upwards threading that short defile, came breezily
out above, to where the mountain-top, part sheltered
northward, by a taller brother, sloped gently off a space,
ere darkly plunging; and here, among fantastic rocks,
reposing in a herd, the foot-track wound, half beaten, up
to a little, low-storied, grayish cottage, capped,
nun-like, with a peaked roof.
On one slope, the roof
was deeply weather-stained, and, nigh the turfy
eaves-trough, all velvet-napped; no doubt the snail-monks
founded mossy priories there. The other slope was newly
shingled. On the north side, doorless and windowless, the
clap-boards, innocent of paint, were yet green as the
north side of lichened pines, or copperless hulls of
Japanese junks, becalmed. The whole base, like those of
the neighboring rocks, was rimmed about with shaded
streaks of richest sod; for, with hearth-stones in fairy
land, the natural rock, though housed, preserves to the
last, just as in open fields, its fertilizing charm; only,
by necessity, working now at a remove, to the sward
without. So, at least, says Oberon, grave authority in
fairy lore. Though setting Oberon aside, certain it is,
that, even in the common world, the soil, close up to
farm-houses, as close up to pasture rocks, is, even though
untended, ever richer than it is a few rods off—such
gentle, nurturing heat is radiated there.
But with this cottage,
the shaded streaks were richest in its front and about its
entrance, where the ground-sill, and especially the
door-sill had, through long eld, quietly settled down.
No fence was seen, no
inclosure. Near by—ferns, ferns, ferns; further—woods,
woods, woods; beyond—mountains, mountains, mountains;
then—sky, sky, sky. Turned out in ærial commons,
pasture for the mountain moon. Nature, and but nature,
house and all; even a low cross-pile of silver birch,
piled openly, to season; up among whose silvery sticks, as
through the fencing of some sequestered grave, sprang
vagrant raspberry bushes—willful assertors of their
right of way.
The foot-track, so dainty
narrow, just like a sheep-track, led through long ferns
that lodged. Fairy land at last, thought I; Una and her
lamb dwell here. Truly, a small abode—mere palanquin,
set down on the summit, in a pass between two worlds,
participant of neither.
A sultry hour, and I wore
a light hat, of yellow sinnet, with white duck trowsers—both
relics of my tropic sea-going. Clogged in the muffling
ferns, I softly stumbled, staining the knees a sea-green.
Pausing at the threshold,
or rather where threshold once had been, I saw, through
the open door-way, a lonely girl, sewing at a lonely
window. A pale-cheeked girl, and fly-specked window, with
wasps about the mended upper panes. I spoke. She shyly
started, like some Tahiti girl, secreted for a sacrifice,
first catching sight, through palms, of Captain Cook.
Recovering, she bade me enter; with her apron brushed off
a stool; then silently resumed her own. With thanks I took
the stool; but now, for a space, I, too, was mute. This,
then, is the fairy-mountain house, and here, the fairy
queen sitting at her fairy window.
I went up to it.
Downwards, directed by the tunneled pass, as through a
leveled telescope, I caught sight of a far-off, soft,
azure world. I hardly knew it, though I came from it.
"You must find this
view very pleasant." said I, at last.
"Oh, sir,"
tears starting in her eyes, "the first time I looked
out of this window, I said 'never, never shall I weary of
this.'"
"And what wearies
you of it now?"
"I don't know,"
while a tear fell; "but it is not the view, it is
Marianna."
Some months back, her
brother, only seventeen, had come hither, a long way from
the other side, to cut wood and burn coal, and she, elder
sister, had accompanied him. Long had they been orphans,
and now, sole inhabitants of the sole house upon the
mountain. No guest came, no traveler passed. The zigzag,
perilous road was only used at seasons by the coal wagons.
The brother was absent the entire day, sometimes the
entire night. When at evening, fagged out, he did come
home, he soon left his bench, poor fellow, for his bed;
just as one, at last, wearily quits that, too, for still
deeper rest. The bench, the bed, the grave.
Silent I stood by the
fairy window, while these things were being told.
"Do you know,"
said she at last, as stealing from her story, "do you
know who lives yonder?—I have never been down into that
country—away off there, I mean; that house, that marble
one," pointing far across the lower landscape;
"have you not caught it? there, on the long
hill-side: the field before, the woods behind; the white
shines out against their blue; don't you mark it? the only
house in sight."
I looked; and after a
time, to my surprise, recognized, more by its position
than its aspect, or Marianna's description, my own abode,
glimmering much like this mountain one from the piazza.
The mirage haze made it appear less a farm-house than King
Charming's palace.
"I have often
wondered who lives there; but it must be some happy one;
again this morning was I thinking so."
"Some happy
one," returned I, starting; "and why do you
think that? You judge some rich one lives there?"
"Rich or not, I
never thought; but it looks so happy, I can't tell how;
and it is so far away. Sometimes I think I do but dream it
is there. You should see it in a sunset."
"No doubt the sunset
gilds it finely; but not more than the sunrise does this
house, perhaps."
"This house? The sun
is a good sun, but it never gilds this house. Why should
it? This old house is rotting. That makes it so mossy. In
the morning, the sun comes in at this old window, to be
sure—boarded up, when first we came; a window I can't
keep clean, do what I may—and half burns, and nearly
blinds me at my sewing, besides setting the flies and
wasps astir—such flies and wasps as only lone mountain
houses know. See, here is the curtain—this apron—I try
to shut it out with then. It fades it, you see. Sun gild
this house? not that ever Marianna saw."
"Because when this
roof is gilded most, then you stay here within."
"The hottest,
weariest hour of day, you mean? Sir, the sun gilds not
this roof. It leaked so, brother newly shingled all one
side. Did you not see it? The north side, where the sun
strikes most on what the rain has wetted. The sun is a
good sun; but this roof, it first scorches, and then rots.
An old house. They went West, and are long dead, they say,
who built it. A mountain house. In winter no fox could den
in it. That chimney-place has been blocked up with snow,
just like a hollow stump."
"Yours are strange
fancies, Marianna."
"They but reflect
the things."
"Then I should have
said, 'These are strange things,' rather than, 'Yours are
strange fancies.'"
"As you will;"
and took up her sewing.
Something in those quiet
words, or in that quiet act, it made me mute again; while,
noting, through the fairy window, a broad shadow stealing
on, as cast by some gigantic condor, floating at brooding
poise on outstretched wings, I marked how, by its deeper
and inclusive dusk, it wiped away into itself all lesser
shades of rock or fern.
"You watch the
cloud," said Marianna.
"No, a shadow; a
cloud's, no doubt—though that I cannot see. How did you
know it? Your eyes are on your work."
"It dusked my work.
There, now the cloud is gone, Tray comes back."
"How?"
"The dog, the shaggy
dog. At noon, he steals off, of himself, to change his
shape—returns, and lies down awhile, nigh the door.
Don't you see him? His head is turned round at you;
though, when you came, he looked before him."
"Your eyes rest but
on your work; what do you speak of?"
"By the window,
crossing."
"You mean this
shaggy shadow—the nigh one? And, yes, now that I mark
it, it is not unlike a large, black Newfoundland dog. The
invading shadow gone, the invaded one returns. But I do
not see what casts it."
"For that, you must
go without."
"One of those grassy
rocks, no doubt."
"You see his head,
his face?"
"The shadow's? You
speak as if you saw it, and all the time your
eyes are on your work."
"Tray looks at
you," still without glancing up; "this is his
hour; I see him."
"Have you, then, so
long sat at this mountain-window, where but clouds and
vapors pass, that, to you, shadows are as things, though
you speak of them as of phantoms; that, by familiar
knowledge, working like a second sight, you can, without
looking for them, tell just where they are, though, as
having mice-like feet, they creep about, and come and go;
that, to you, these lifeless shadows are as living
friends, who, though out of sight, are not out of mind,
even in their faces—is it so?"
"That way I never
thought of it. But the friendliest one, that used to
soothe my weariness so much, coolly quivering on the
ferns, it was taken from me, never to return, as Tray did
just now. The shadow of a birch. The tree was struck by
lightning, and brother cut it up. You saw the cross-pile
out-doors—the buried root lies under it; but not the
shadow. That is flown, and never will come back, nor ever
anywhere stir again."
Another cloud here stole
along, once more blotting out the dog, and blackening all
the mountain; while the stillness was so still, deafness
might have forgot itself, or else believed that noiseless
shadow spoke.
"Birds, Marianna,
singing-birds, I hear none; I hear nothing. Boys and
bob-o-links, do they never come a-berrying up here?"
"Birds, I seldom
hear; boys, never. The berries mostly ripe and fall—few,
but me, the wiser."
"But yellow-birds
showed me the way—part way, at least."
"And then flew back.
I guess they play about the mountain-side, but don't make
the top their home. And no doubt you think that, living so
lonesome here, knowing nothing, hearing nothing—little,
at least, but sound of thunder and the fall of
trees—never reading, seldom speaking, yet ever wakeful,
this is what gives me my strange thoughts—for so you
call them—this weariness and wakefulness together
Brother, who stands and works in open air, would I could
rest like him; but mine is mostly but dull woman's
work—sitting, sitting, restless sitting."
"But, do you not go
walk at times? These woods are wide."
"And lonesome;
lonesome, because so wide. Sometimes, 'tis true, of
afternoons, I go a little way; but soon come back again.
Better feel lone by hearth, than rock. The shadows
hereabouts I know—those in the woods are
strangers."
"But the
night?"
"Just like the day.
Thinking, thinking—a wheel I cannot stop; pure want of
sleep it is that turns it."
"I have heard that,
for this wakeful weariness, to say one's prayers, and then
lay one's head upon a fresh hop pillow——"
"Look!"
Through the fairy window,
she pointed down the steep to a small garden patch near
by—mere pot of rifled loam, half rounded in by
sheltering rocks—where, side by side, some feet apart,
nipped and puny, two hop-vines climbed two poles, and,
gaining their tip-ends, would have then joined over in an
upward clasp, but the baffled shoots, groping awhile in
empty air, trailed back whence they sprung.
"You have tried the
pillow, then?"
"Yes."
"And prayer?"
"Prayer and
pillow."
"Is there no other
cure, or charm?"
"Oh, if I could but
once get to yonder house, and but look upon whoever the
happy being is that lives there! A foolish thought: why do
I think it? Is it that I live so lonesome, and know
nothing?"
"I, too, know
nothing; and, therefore, cannot answer; but, for your
sake, Marianna, well could wish that I were that happy one
of the happy house you dream you see; for then you would
behold him now, and, as you say, this weariness might
leave you."
—Enough. Launching my
yawl no more for fairy-land, I stick to the piazza. It is
my box-royal; and this amphitheatre, my theatre of San
Carlo. Yes, the scenery is magical—the illusion so
complete. And Madam Meadow Lark, my prima donna, plays her
grand engagement here; and, drinking in her sunrise note,
which, Memnon-like, seems struck from the golden window,
how far from me the weary face behind it.
But, every night, when
the curtain falls, truth comes in with darkness. No light
shows from the mountain. To and fro I walk the piazza
deck, haunted by Marianna's face, and many as real a
story.
|
