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Devereux, Book VI.

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BOOK VI.



CHAPTER I.

THE RETREAT.

I ARRIVED at St. Petersburg, and found the Czarina, whose conjugal
perfidy was more than suspected, tolerably resigned to the extinction of
that dazzling life whose incalculable and god-like utility it is
reserved for posterity to appreciate! I have observed, by the way, that
in general men are the less mourned by their families in proportion as
they are the more mourned by the community. The great are seldom
amiable; and those who are the least lenient to our errors are
invariably our relations!

Many circumstances at that time conspired to make my request to quit the
imperial service appear natural and appropriate. The death of the Czar,
joined to a growing jealousy and suspicion between the English monarch
and Russia, which, though long existing, was now become more evident and
notorious than heretofore, gave me full opportunity to observe that my
pardon had been obtained from King George three years since, and that
private as well as national ties rendered my return to England a measure
not only of expediency but necessity. The imperial Catherine granted me
my dismissal in the most flattering terms, and added the high
distinction of the Order founded in honour of the memorable feat by
which she had saved her royal consort and the Russian army to the Order
of St. Andrew, which I had already received.

I transferred my wealth, now immense, to England, and, with the pomp
which became the rank and reputation Fortune had bestowed upon me, I
commenced the long land-journey I had chalked out to myself. Although I
had alleged my wish to revisit England as the main reason of my
retirement from Russia, I had also expressed an intention of visiting
Italy previous to my return to England. The physicians, indeed, had
recommended to me that delicious climate as an antidote to the ills my
constitution had sustained in the freezing skies of the north; and in my
own heart I had secretly appointed some more solitary part of the Divine
Land for the scene of my purposed hermitage and seclusion. It is indeed
astonishing how those who have lived much in cold climates yearn for
lands of mellow light and summer luxuriance; and I felt for a southern
sky the same resistless longing which sailors, in the midst of the vast
ocean, have felt for the green fields and various landscape of the
shore.

I traversed, then, the immense tracts of Russia, passed through Hungary,
entered Turkey, which I had wished to visit, where I remained a short
time; and, crossing the Adriatic, hailed, for the first time, the
Ausonian shore. It was the month of May--that month, of whose lustrous
beauty none in a northern clime can dream--that I entered Italy. It may
serve as an instance of the power with which a thought that, however
important, is generally deemed of too abstract and metaphysical a nature
deeply to engross the mind, possessed me then, that I--no cold nor
unenthusiastic votary of the classic Muse--made no pilgrimage to city or
ruin, but, after a brief sojourn at Ravenna, where I dismissed all my
train, set out alone to find the solitary cell for which I now sickened
with a hermit's love.

It was at a small village at the foot of the Apennines that I found the
object of my search. Strangely enough, there blended with my
philosophical ardour a deep mixture of my old romance. Nature, to whose
voice the dweller in cities and struggler with mankind had been so long
obtuse, now pleaded audibly at my heart, and called me to her embraces,
as a mother calls unto her wearied child. My eye, as with a new vision,
became open to the mute yet eloquent loveliness of this most fairy
earth; and hill and valley, the mirror of silent waters, the sunny
stillness of woods, and the old haunts of satyr and nymph, revived in me
the fountains of past poetry, and became the receptacles of a thousand
spells, mightier than the charms of any enchanter save Love, which was
departed,--Youth, which was nearly gone,--and Nature, which (more
vividly than ever) existed for me still.

I chose, then, my retreat. As I was fastidious in its choice, I cannot
refrain from the luxury of describing it. Ah, little did I dream that I
had come thither, not only to find a divine comfort but the sources of a
human and most passionate woe! Mightiest of the Roman bards! in whom
tenderness and reason were so entwined, and who didst sanctify even
thine unholy errors with so beautiful and rare a genius! what an
invariable truth one line of thine has expressed: "Even in the fairest
fountain of delight there is a secret and evil spring eternally bubbling
up and scattering its bitter waters over the very flowers which surround
its margin!"

In the midst of a lovely and tranquil vale was a small cottage; that was
my home. The good people there performed for me all the hospitable
offices I required. At a neighbouring monastery I had taken the
precaution to make myself known to the superior. Not all Italians--no,
nor all monks--belong to either of the two great tribes into which they
are generally divided,--knaves or fools. The Abbot Anselmo was a man of
rather a liberal and enlarged mind; he not only kept my secret, which
was necessary to my peace, but he took my part, which was perhaps
necessary to my safety. A philosopher, who desires only to convince
himself, and upon one subject, does not require many books. Truth lies
in a small compass; and for my part, in considering any speculative
subject, I would sooner have with me one book of Euclid as a model than
all the library of the Vatican as authorities. But then I am not fond
of drawing upon any resources but those of reason for reasonings: wiser
men than I am are not so strict. The few books that I did require were,
however, of a nature very illicit in Italy; the good Father passed them
to me from Ravenna, under his own protection. "I was a holy man," he
said, "who wished to render the Catholic Church a great service, by
writing a vast book against certain atrocious opinions; and the works I
read were, for the most part, works that I was about to confute." This
report gained me protection and respect; and, after I had ordered my
agent at Ravenna to forward to the excellent Abbot a piece of plate, and
a huge cargo of a rare Hungary wine, it was not the Abbot's fault if I
was not the most popular person in the neighbourhood.

But to my description: my home was a cottage; the valley in which it lay
was divided by a mountain stream, which came from the forest Apennine, a
sparkling and wild stranger, and softened into quiet and calm as it
proceeded through its green margin in the vale. And that margin, how
dazzlingly green it was! At the distance of about a mile from my hut,
the stream was broken into a slight waterfall, whose sound was heard
distinct and deep in that still place; and often I paused, from my
midnight thoughts, to listen to its enchanted and wild melody. The fall
was unseen by the ordinary wanderer, for, there, the stream passed
through a thick copse; and even when you pierced the grove, and gained
the water-side, dark trees hung over the turbulent wave, and the silver
spray was thrown upward through the leaves, and fell in diamonds upon
the deep green sod.

This was a most favoured haunt with me: the sun glancing through the
idle leaves; the music of the water; the solemn absence of all other
sounds, except the songs of birds, to which the ear grew accustomed,
and, at last, in the abstraction of thought, scarcely distinguished from
the silence; the fragrant herbs; and the unnumbered and nameless flowers
which formed my couch,--were all calculated to make me pursue
uninterruptedly the thread of contemplation which I had, in the less
voluptuous and harsher solitude of the closet, first woven from the web
of austerest thought. I say pursue, for it was too luxurious and
sensual a retirement for the conception of a rigid and severe train of
reflection; at least it would have been so to me. But when the thought
/is once born/, such scenes seem to me the most fit to cradle and to
rear it. The torpor of the physical appears to leave to the mental
frame a full scope and power; the absence of human cares, sounds, and
intrusions, becomes the best nurse to contemplation; and even that
delicious and vague sense of enjoyment which would seem, at first, more
genial to the fancy than the mind, preserves the thought undisturbed
because contented; so that all but the scheming mind becomes lapped in
sleep, and the mind itself lives distinct and active as a dream,--a
dream, not vague nor confused nor unsatisfying, but endowed with more
than the clearness, the precision, the vigour, of waking life.

A little way from this waterfall was a fountain, a remnant of a classic
and golden age. Never did Naiad gaze on a more glassy mirror, or dwell
in a more divine retreat. Through a crevice in an overhanging mound of
the emerald earth, the father stream of the fountain crept out, born,
like Love, among flowers, and in the most sunny smiles; it then fell,
broadening and glowing, into a marble basin, at whose bottom, in the
shining noon, you might see a soil which mocked the very hues of gold,
and the water insects, in their quaint shapes and unknown sports,
grouping or gliding in the mid-most wave. A small temple of the
lightest architecture stood before the fountain, and in a niche therein
a mutilated statue,--possibly of the Spirit of the place. By this
fountain my evening walk would linger till the short twilight melted
away and the silver wave trembled in the light of the western star. Oh,
then what feelings gathered over me as I turned slowly homeward! the air
still, breathless, shining; the stars gleaming over the woods of the far
Apennine; the hills growing huger in the shade; the small insects
humming on the wing; and, ever and anon, the swift bat, wheeling round
and amidst them; the music of the waterfall deepening on the ear; and
the light and hour lending even a mysterious charm to the cry of the
weird owl, flitting after its prey,--all this had a harmony in my
thoughts and a food for the meditations in which my days and nights were
consumed. The World moulders away the fabric of our early nature, and
Solitude rebuilds it on a firmer base.



CHAPTER II.

THE VICTORY.

O EARTH! Reservoir of life, over whose deep bosom brood the wings of
the Universal Spirit, shaking upon thee a blessing and a power,--a
blessing and a power to produce and reproduce the living from the dead,
so that our flesh is woven from the same atoms which were once the atoms
of our sires, and the inexhaustible nutriment of Existence is Decay! O
eldest and most solemn Earth, blending even thy loveliness and joy with
a terror and an awe! thy sunshine is girt with clouds and circled with
storm and tempest; thy day cometh from the womb of darkness, and
returneth unto darkness, as man returns unto thy bosom. The green herb
that laughs in the valley, the water that sings merrily along the wood;
the many-winged and all-searching air, which garners life as a harvest
and scatters it as a seed,--all are pregnant with corruption and carry
the cradled death within them, as an oak banqueteth the destroying worm.
But who that looks upon thee, and loves thee, and inhales thy blessings
will ever mingle too deep a moral with his joy? Let us not ask whence
come the garlands that we wreathe around our altars or shower upon our
feasts: will they not bloom as brightly, and breathe with as rich a
fragrance, whether they be plucked from the garden or the grave? O
Earth, my Mother Earth! dark Sepulchre that closes upon all which the
Flesh bears, but Vestibule of the vast regions which the Soul shall
pass, how leaped my heart within me when I first fathomed thy real
spell!

Yes! never shall I forget the rapture with which I hailed the light that
dawned upon me at last! Never shall I forget the suffocating, the full,
the ecstatic joy with which I saw the mightiest of all human hopes
accomplished; and felt, as if an angel spoke, that there is a life
beyond the grave! Tell me not of the pride of ambition; tell me not of
the triumphs of science: never had ambition so lofty an end as the
search after immortality! never had science so sublime a triumph as the
conviction that immortality will be gained! I had been at my task the
whole night,--pale alchymist, seeking from meaner truths to extract the
greatest of all! At the first hour of day, lo! the gold was there: the
labour for which I would have relinquished life was accomplished; the
dove descended upon the waters of my soul. I fled from the house. I
was possessed as with a spirit. I ascended a hill, which looked for
leagues over the sleeping valley. A gray mist hung around me like a
veil; I paused, and the great sun broke slowly forth; I gazed upon its
majesty, and my heart swelled. "So rises the soul," I said, "from the
vapours of this dull being; but the soul waneth not, neither setteth it,
nor knoweth it any night, save that from which it dawneth!" The mists
rolled gradually away, the sunshine deepened, and the face of Nature lay
in smiles, yet silently, before me. It lay before me, a scene that I
had often witnessed and hailed and worshipped: /but it was not the
same/; a glory had passed over it; it was steeped in a beauty and a
holiness, in which neither youth nor poetry nor even love had ever robed
it before! The change which the earth had undergone was like that of
some being we have loved, when death is passed, and from a mortal it
becomes an angel!

I uttered a cry of joy, and was then as silent as all around me. I felt
as if henceforth there was a new compact between Nature and myself. I
felt as if every tree and blade of grass were henceforth to be eloquent
with a voice and instinct with a spell. I felt as if a religion had
entered into the earth, and made oracles of all that the earth bears;
the old fables of Dodona were to become realized, and /the very leaves/
to be hallowed by a sanctity and to murmur with a truth. I was no
longer only a part of that which withers and decays; I was no longer a
machine of clay, moved by a spring, and to be trodden into the mire
which I had trod; I was no longer tied to humanity by links which could
never be broken, and which, if broken, would avail me not. I was
become, as if by a miracle, a part of a vast though unseen spirit. It
was not to the matter, but to the essences, of things that I bore
kindred and alliance; the stars and the heavens resumed over me their
ancient influence; and, as I looked along the far hills and the silent
landscape, a voice seemed to swell from the stillness, and to say, "I am
the life of these things, a spirit distinct from the things themselves.
It is to me that you belong forever and forever: separate, but equally
indissoluble; apart, but equally eternal!"

I spent the day upon the hills. It was evening when I returned. I
lingered by the old fountain, and saw the stars rise, and tremble, one
by one, upon the wave. The hour was that which Isora had loved the
best, and that which the love of her had consecrated the most to me.
And never, oh, never, did it sink into my heart with a deeper sweetness,
or a more soothing balm. I had once more knit my soul to Isora's: I
could once more look from the toiling and the dim earth, and forget that
Isora had left me, in dreaming of our reunion. Blame me not, you who
indulge in a religious hope more severe and more sublime; you who miss
no footsteps from the earth, nor pine for a voice that your human
wanderings can hear no more,--blame me not, you whose pulses beat not
for the wild love of the created, but whose spirit languishes only for a
nearer commune with the Creator,--blame me not too harshly for my mortal
wishes, nor think that my faith was the less sincere because it was
tinted in the most unchanging dyes of the human heart, and indissolubly
woven with the memory of the dead! Often from our weaknesses our
strongest principles of conduct are born; and from the acorn which a
breeze has wafted springs the oak which defies the storm.

The first intoxication and rapture consequent upon the reward of my
labour passed away; but, unlike other excitement, it was followed not by
languor or a sated and torpid calm: a soothing and delicious sensation
possessed me; my turbulent senses slept; and Memory, recalling the
world, rejoiced at the retreat which Hope had acquired.

I now surrendered myself to a nobler philosophy than in crowds and
cities I had hitherto known. I no longer satirized; I inquired: I no
longer derided; I examined. I looked from the natural proofs of
immortality to the written promise of our Father; I sought not to baffle
men, but to worship Truth; I applied myself more to the knowledge of
good and evil; I bowed my soul before the loveliness of Virtue; and
though scenes of wrath and passion yet lowered in the future, and I was
again speedily called forth to act, to madden, to contend, perchance to
sin, the Image is still unbroken, and the Votary has still an offering
for its Altar!



CHAPTER III.

THE HERMIT OF THE WELL.

THE thorough and deep investigation of those principles from which we
learn the immortality of the soul, and the nature of its proper ends,
leads the mind through such a course of reflection and of study; it is
attended with so many exalting, purifying, and, if I may so say,
etherealizing thoughts,--that I do believe no man has ever pursued it,
and not gone back to the world a better and a nobler man than he was
before. Nay, so deeply must these elevating and refining studies be
conned, so largely and sensibly must they enter the intellectual system,
that I firmly think that even a sensualist who has only considered the
subject with a view to convince himself that he is clay, and has
therefore an excuse to the curious conscience for his grosser desires;
nay, should he come to his wished-for yet desolate conclusion, from
which the abhorrent nature shrinks and recoils, I do nevertheless firmly
think, should the study have been long and deep, that he would wonder to
find his desires had lost their poignancy and his objects their charm.
He would descend from the Alp he had climbed to the low level on which
he formerly deemed it a bliss to dwell, with the feeling of one who,
having long drawn in high places an empyreal air, has become unable to
inhale the smoke and the thick vapour he inhaled of yore. His soul once
aroused would stir within him, though he felt it not, and though he grew
not a believer, he would cease to be only the voluptuary.

I meant at one time to have here stated the arguments which had
perplexed me on one side, and those which afterwards convinced me on the
other. I do not do so for many reasons, one of which will suffice;
namely, the evident and palpable circumstance that a dissertation of
that nature would, in a biography like the present, be utterly out of
place and season. Perhaps, however, at a later period of life, I may
collect my own opinions on the subject into a separate work, and
bequeath that work to future generations, upon the same conditions as
the present memoir.

One day I was favoured by a visit from one of the monks at the
neighbouring abbey. After some general conversation he asked me if I
had yet encountered the Hermit of the Well?

"No," said I, and I was going to add, that I had not even heard of him,
"but I now remember that the good people of the house have more than
once spoken to me of him as a rigid and self-mortifying recluse."

"Yes," said the holy friar; "Heaven forbid that I should say aught
against the practice of the saints and pious men to deny unto themselves
the lusts of the flesh, but such penances may be carried too far.
However, it is an excellent custom, and the Hermit of the Well is an
excellent creature. /Santa Maria!/ what delicious stuff is that Hungary
wine your scholarship was pleased to bestow upon our father Abbot. He
suffered me to taste it the eve before last. I had been suffering with
a pain in the reins, and the wine acted powerfully upon me as an
efficacious and inestimable medicine. Do you find, my Son, that it bore
the journey to your lodging here as well as to the convent cellars?"

"Why, really, my Father, I have none of it here; but the people of the
house have a few flasks of a better wine than ordinary, if you will
deign to taste it in lieu of the Hungary wine."

"Oh--oh!" said the monk, groaning, "my reins trouble me much: perhaps
the wine may comfort me!" and the wine was brought.

"It is not of so rare a flavour as that which you sent to our reverend
father," said the monk, wiping his mouth with his long sleeve. "Hungary
must be a charming place; is it far from hence? It joins the
heretical,--I pray your pardon, it joins the continent of England, I
believe?"

"Not exactly, Father; but whatever its topography, it is a rare
country--for those who like it! But tell me of this Hermit of the Well.
How long has he lived here? and how came he by his appellation? Of what
country is he? and of what birth?"

"You ask me too many questions at once, my Son. The country of the holy
man is a mystery to us all. He speaks the Tuscan dialect well, but with
a foreign accent. Nevertheless, though the wine is not of Hungary, it
has a pleasant flavour. I wonder how the rogues kept it so snugly from
the knowledge and comfort of their pious brethren of the monastery!"

"And how long has the Hermit lived in your vicinity?"

"Nearly eight years, my Son. It was one winter's evening that he came
to our convent in the dress of a worldly traveller, to seek our
hospitality, and a shelter for the night, which was inclement and
stormy. He stayed with us a few days, and held some conversation with
our father Abbot; and one morning, after roaming in the neighbourhood to
look at the old stones and ruins, which is the custom of travellers, he
returned, put into our box some alms, and two days afterwards he
appeared in the place he now inhabits and in the dress he assumes."

"And of what nature, my Father, is the place, and of what fashion the
dress?"

"Holy Saint Francis!" exclaimed the Father, with a surprise so great
that I thought at first it related to the wine, "Holy Saint Francis!
have you not seen the well yet?"

"No, Father, unless you speak of the fountain about a mile and a quarter
distant."

"Tusk--tusk!" said the good man, "what ignoramuses you travellers are!
You affect to know what kind of slippers Prester John wears and to have
been admitted to the bed-chamber of /the Pagoda of China/; and yet, when
one comes to sound you, you are as ignorant of everything a man of real
learning knows as an Englishman is of his missal. Why, I thought that
every fool in every country had heard of the Holy Well of St. Francis,
situated exactly two miles from our famous convent, and that every fool
in the neighbourhood had seen it."

"What the fools, my Father, whether in this neighbourhood or any other,
may have heard or seen, I, who profess not ostensibly to belong to so
goodly an order, cannot pretend to know; but be assured that the Holy
Well of St. Francis is as unfamiliar to me as the Pagoda of
China--Heaven bless /him/--is to you."

Upon this the learned monk, after expressing due astonishment, offered
to show it to me; and as I thought I might by acquiescence get rid of
him the sooner, and as, moreover, I wished to see the Abbot, to whom
some books for me had been lately sent, I agreed to the offer.

The well, said the monk, lay not above a mile out of the customary way
to the monastery; and after /we/ had finished the flask of wine, we
sallied out on our excursion,--the monk upon a stately and strong ass,
myself on foot.

The Abbot, on granting me his friendship and protection, had observed
that I was not the only stranger and recluse on whom his favour was
bestowed. He had then mentioned the Hermit of the Well, as an eccentric
and strange being, who lived an existence of rigid penance, harmless to
others, painful only to himself. This story had been confirmed in the
few conversations I had ever interchanged with my host and hostess, who
seemed to take a peculiar pleasure in talking of the Solitary; and from
them I had heard also many anecdotes of his charity towards the poor and
his attention to the sick. All these circumstances came into my mind as
the good monk indulged his loquacity upon the subject, and my curiosity
became at last somewhat excited respecting my fellow recluse.

I now learned from the monk that the post of Hermit of the Well was an
office of which the present anchorite was by no means the first tenant.
The well was one of those springs, frequent in Catholic countries, to
which a legend and a sanctity are attached; and twice a year--once in
the spring, once in the autumn--the neighbouring peasants flocked
together, on a stated day, to drink, and lose their diseases. As the
spring most probably did possess some medicinal qualities, a few
extraordinary cures had occurred, especially among those pious persons
who took not biennial, but constant draughts; and to doubt its holiness
was downright heresy.

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