第29章
Che difesa miglior ch' usbergo e scudo, E la santa innocenza al petto ignudo!
"Ger.Lib.," c.viii.xli.
(Better defence than shield or breastplate is holy innocence to the naked breast.)And they buried the musician and his barbiton together, in the same coffin.That famous Steiner--primeval Titan of the great Tyrolese race--often hast thou sought to scale the heavens, and therefore must thou, like the meaner children of men, descend to the dismal Hades! Harder fate for thee than thy mortal master.
For THY soul sleeps with thee in the coffin.And the music that belongs to HIS, separate from the instrument, ascends on high, to be heard often by a daughter's pious ears when the heaven is serene and the earth sad.For there is a sense of hearing that the vulgar know not.And the voices of the dead breathe soft and frequent to those who can unite the memory with the faith.
And now Viola is alone in the world,--alone in the home where loneliness had seemed from the cradle a thing that was not of nature.And at first the solitude and the stillness were insupportable.Have you, ye mourners, to whom these sibyl leaves, weird with many a dark enigma, shall be borne, have you not felt that when the death of some best-loved one has made the hearth desolate,--have you not felt as if the gloom of the altered home was too heavy for thought to bear?--you would leave it, though a palace, even for a cabin.And yet,--sad to say,--when you obey the impulse, when you fly from the walls, when in the strange place in which you seek your refuge nothing speaks to you of the lost, have ye not felt again a yearning for that very food to memory which was just before but bitterness and gall? Is it not almost impious and profane to abandon that dear hearth to strangers? And the desertion of the home where your parents dwelt, and blessed you, upbraids your conscience as if you had sold their tombs.
Beautiful was the Etruscan superstition that the ancestors become the household gods.Deaf is the heart to which the Lares call from the desolate floors in vain.At first Viola had, in her intolerable anguish, gratefully welcomed the refuge which the house and family of a kindly neighbour, much attached to her father, and who was one of the orchestra that Pisani shall perplex no more, had proffered to the orphan.But the company of the unfamiliar in our grief, the consolation of the stranger, how it irritates the wound! And then, to hear elsewhere the name of father, mother, child,--as if death came alone to you,--to see elsewhere the calm regularity of those lives united in love and order, keeping account of happy hours, the unbroken timepiece of home, as if nowhere else the wheels were arrested, the chain shattered, the hands motionless, the chime still! No, the grave itself does not remind us of our loss like the company of those who have no loss to mourn.Go back to thy solitude, young orphan,--go back to thy home: the sorrow that meets thee on the threshold can greet thee, even in its sadness, like the smile upon the face of the dead.And there, from thy casement, and there, from without thy door, thou seest still the tree, solitary as thyself, and springing from the clefts of the rock, but forcing its way to light,--as, through all sorrow, while the seasons yet can renew the verdure and bloom of youth, strives the instinct of the human heart! Only when the sap is dried up, only when age comes on, does the sun shine in vain for man and for the tree.
Weeks and months--months sad and many--again passed, and Naples will not longer suffer its idol to seclude itself from homage.