Imatges de pàgina
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At Padua.

not cause me to doubt their
presence,
particularly as I did see upon the
screen a great number of coins offered
for the repose of the martyrs' souls. I
threw down some soldi, and thus en-
thralled the sacristan.

If the signor cared to see prisons, he said, the driver must take him to those of Ecelino, at present the property of a private gentleman near by. As I had just bought a history of Ecelino, at a great bargain, from a second-hand bookstall, and had a lively interest in all the enormities of that nobleman, I sped the driver instantly to the villa of the Signor Pacchiarotti.

It depends here altogether upon the freshness or mustiness of the reader's historical reading whether he cares to be reminded more particularly who Ecelino was. He flourished balefully in the early half of the thirteenth century as lord of Vicenza, Verona, Padua, and Brescia, and was defeated and hurt to death in an attempt to possess himself of Milan. He was in every respect a remarkable man for that time, fearless, abstemious, continent, avaricious, hardy, and unspeakably ambitious and cruel. He survived and suppressed innumerable conspiracies, escaping even the thrust of the assassin whom the fame of his enormous wickedness had caused the Old Man of the Mountain to send against him. As lord of Padua he was more incredibly severe and bloody in his rule than as lord of the other cities, for the Paduans had been latest free, and conspired most frequently against him. He extirpated whole families on suspicion that a single member had been concerned in a meditated revolt. Little children and helpless women suffered hideous mutilation and shame at his hands. Six prisons in Padua were constantly filled by his arrests. The whole country was traversed by witnesses of his cruelties, men and women deprived of an arm or leg, and begging from door to door. He had long been excommunicated; at last the Church proclaimed a crusade against him, and his lieutenant and nephew

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selfmore demoniacal, if possible, than himwas driven out of Padua while he was operating against Mantua. Ecelino retired to Verona, and maintained a struggle against the crusade for nearly two years longer, with a courage which prisoner, the soldiers of the victorious never failed him. Wounded and taken army gathered about him, and heaped insult and reproach upon him; and one had been cut off by Ecelino's command, furious peasant, whose brother's feet dealt the helpless monster four blows upon the head with a scythe. By some, Ecelino is said to have died of these lated that his death was a kind of suiwounds alone; but by others it is recide, inasmuch as he himself put the bandages from his hurts, and refusing case past surgery by tearing off the all medicines.

II.

ENTERING at the enchanted portal selves in a realm of wonder. It was of the Villa P- -, we found ourwho compelled all the marvels on which our misfortune not to see the magician we looked, but for that very reason, his greatness. perhaps, we have the clearest sense of

held the evidences of his ingenious but lugubrious fancy, which everywhere tended to a monumental and mortuary effect. A sort of vestibule first reglimmered the garden. The walls of ceived us, and beyond this dripped and the vestibule were covered with inscriptions setting forth the sentiments of the cerning life and death; we began with philosophy and piety of all ages conConfucius, and we ended with Benjamino Franklino. But as if these ideas of mortality were not sufficiently depressing, the funereal Signor Pthe ashes of the most famous men had collected into earthern amphora of ancient and modern times, and arranged them so that a sense of their number and variety should at once strike his visitor. Each jar was conspicuously labelled with the name its illustrious dust had borne in life; and if

Everywhere we be

hers. She repeated the first lines, something about a lamb; but neither S nor I remembered them.

On the walls of the chancel there are monuments to the Flemings, and painted escutcheons of their arms; and along the side walls also, and on the square pillars of the row of arches, there are other monuments, generally of white marble, with the letters of the inscription blackened. On these pillars, likewise, and in many places in the walls, were hung verses from Scripture, painted on boards. At one of the doors was a poor-box, an elaborately carved little box of oak, with the date 1648, and the name of the church-St. Oswald's upon it. The whole interior of the edifice was plain, simple, almost to grimness, - or would have been so, only that the foolish church-wardens, or other authority, have washed it over with the same buff color with which they have overlaid the exterior. It is a pity; it lightens it up, and desecrates it horribly, especially as the woman says that there were formerly paintings on the walls, now obliterated forever. I could have stayed in the old church much longer, and could write much more about it, but there must be an end to everything. Pacing it from the farther end to the elevation before the altar, I found that it was twenty-five paces long.

On looking again at the Rothay, I find I did it some injustice; for at the bridge, in its present swollen state, it is nearer twenty yards than twenty feet across. Its waters are very clear, and it rushes along with a speed which is delightful to see, after an acquaintance with the muddy and sluggish Avon and Leam.

Since tea, I have taken a stroll from the hotel in a different direction from usual, and passed the Swan Inn, where Scott used to go daily to get a draught of liquor when he was visiting Wordsworth, who had no wine nor other inspiriting fluid in his house. It stands directly on the wayside, a small, whitewashed house, with an addition in the rear that seems to have been built since Scott's time. On the door is the paint

ed sign of a swan, -and the name "Scott's Swan Hotel." I walked a considerable distance beyond it; but a shower coming up, I turned back, entered the inn, and, following the mistress into a snug little room, was served with a glass of bitter ale. It is a very plain and homely inn, and certainly could not have satisfied Scott's wants, if he had required anything very farfetched or delicate in his potations. I found two Westmoreland peasants in the room with ale before them. One went away almost immediately; but the other remained, and, entering into conversation with him, he told me that he was going to New Zealand, and expected to sail in September. I announced myself as an American, and he said that a large party had lately gone from hereabouts to America; but he seemed not to understand that there was any distinction between Canada and the States. These people had gone to Quebec. He was a very civil, well-behaved, kindly sort of person, of a simple character, which I took to belong to the class and locality, rather than to himself individually. I could not very well understand all that he said, owing to his provincial dialect; and when he spoke to his own countrymen, or to the women of the house, I really could but just catch a word here and there. How long it takes to melt English down into a homogeneous mass! He told me that there was a public library in Grasmere, to which he has access in common with the other inhabitants, and a reading-room connected with it, where he reads the "Times" in the evening. There was no American smartness in his mind. When I left the house, it was showering briskly; but the drops. quite ceased, and the clouds began to break away, before I reached my hotel, and I saw the new moon over my right shoulder.

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We returned, in the first place, to Ambleside, along the border of Grasmere Lake, which would be a pretty little piece of water, with its steep and highsurrounding hills, were it not that a stubborn and straight-lined stone fence, running along the eastern shore, by the roadside, quite spoils its appearance. Rydal water, though nothing can make a lake of it, looked prettier and less diminutive than at the first view; and, in fact, I find that it is impossible to know accurately how any prospect or other thing looks until after at least a second view, which always essentially corrects the first. This, I think, is especially true in regard to objects which we have heard much about, and exercised our imagination upon; the first view being a vain attempt to reconcile our idea with the reality, and at the second we begin to accept the thing for what it really is. Wordsworth's situation is really a beautiful one; and Nab Scaur behind his house rises with a grand, protecting air. We passed Nab's cottage, in which De Quincey formerly lived, and where Hartley Coleridge lived and died. It is a small, buff-tinted, plastered, stone cottage, immediately on the roadside, and originally, I should think, of a very humble class; but it now looks as if persons of taste might some time or other have sat down in it, and caused flowers to spring up about it. It is very agreeably situated, under the great, precipitous hill, and with Rydal water close at hand, on the other side of the road. An advertisement of lodgings to let was put up on this cottage.

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I question whether any part of the this part of England, at least-on a world looks so beautiful as England — fine summer morning. It makes one to see such a bright, universal verdure; think the more cheerfully of human life such sweet, rural, peaceful, flower-bordered cottages, ity, but dwellings of the laboring poor; not cottages of gentiltastefully contrived for comfort and such nice villas along the roadside, so beauty, and adorned more and more, year after year, with the care and afterthought of people who mean to live in children might live in them also. And them a great while, and feel as if their walks, and train ivy and all beautiful so they plant trees to overshadow their vines up against their walls, — and thus live for the future in another sense than helps them out, and makes everything we Americans do. And the climate instead of dry and arid, as human life moist and green, and full of tender life, and vegetable life are so apt to be with more attractive face than we can, even us. Certainly, England can present a in its humbler modes of life, to say nothing of the beautiful lives that might be led, one would think, by the higher smooth gravelled drives leading through classes, whose gateways, with broad, them, one sees every mile or two along clusion. All this is passing away, and the road, winding into some proud sesociety must assume new relations; but there is no harm in believing that there has been something very good in English life, good for all classes, while the world was in a state out of which these forms naturally grew.

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MONA'S MOTHER.

IN the porch that brier-vines smother,

At her wheel, sits Mona's mother.
O, the day is dying bright!
Roseate shadows, silver dimming,
Ruby lights through amber swimming,
Bring the still and starry night.

Sudden she is 'ware of shadows
Going out across the meadows

From the slowly sinking sun, –
Going through the misty spaces
That the rippling ruby laces, -
Shadows, like the violets tangled,
Like the soft light, softly mingled,
Till the two seem just as one!

Every tell-tale wind doth waft her
Little breaths of maiden laughter.
O, divinely dies the day!
And the swallow, on the rafter,

In her nest of sticks and clay,-
On the rafter, up above her,
With her patience doth reprove her,
Twittering soft the time away;
Never stopping, never stopping,
With her wings so warmly dropping
Round her nest of sticks and clay.

"Take, my bird, O take some other
Eve than this to twitter gay!"
Sayeth, prayeth Mona's mother,
To the slender-throated swallow

On her nest of sticks and clay;
For her sad eyes needs must follow
Down the misty, mint-sweet hollow,
Where the ruby colors play
With the gold, and with the gray.
"Yet, my little Lady-feather,

You do well to sit and sing,"
Crieth, sigheth Mona's mother.
"If you would, you could no other.

Can the leaf fail with the spring?
Can the tendril stay from twining
When the sap begins to run?
Or the dew-drop keep from shining
With her body full o' the sun?
Nor can you, from gladness, either;
Therefore, you do well to sing.
Up and o'er the downy lining

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All along the branches creeping,
To their leafy beds of sleeping

Go the blue-birds and the brown;
Blackbird stoppeth now his clamor,
And the little yellowhammer

Droppeth head in winglet down. Now the rocks rise bleak and barren Through the twilight, gray and still; In the marsh-land now the heron

Clappeth close his horny bill. Death-watch now begins his drumming, And the fire-fly, going, coming, Weaveth zigzag lines of light,— Lines of zigzag, golden-threaded, Up the marshy valley, shaded O'er and o'er with vapors white. Now the lily, open-hearted, Of her dragon-fly deserted,

Swinging on the wind so low, Gives herself, with trust audacious, To the wild warm wave that washes Through her fingers, soft and slow.

O the eyes of Mona's mother!

Dim they grow with tears unshed; For no longer may they follow Down the misty mint-sweet hollow, Down along the yellow mosses That the brook with silver crosses. Ah! the day is dead, is dead; And the cold and curdling shadows, Stretching from the long, low meadows, Darker, deeper, nearer spread, Till she cannot see the twining Of the briers, nor see the lining Round the porch of roses red,

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