Raphael - Pages of the Book of Life at Twenty | Page 7

returned to the tower. Raphael had died during the night,

and the village bell was already tolling for his burial. Women and
children were standing at their doors, looking mournfully in the
direction of the tower, and in the little green field adjoining the church,
two men, with spades and mattock, were digging a grave at the foot of
a cross.
I drew near to the door. A cloud of twittering swallows were fluttering
round the open windows, darting in and out, as though the spoiler had
robbed their nests.
Since then I have read these pages, and now know why he loved to be
surrounded by these birds, and what memories they waked in him, even
to his dying day.

RAPHAEL

I.
There are places and climates, seasons and hours, with their outward
circumstance, so much in harmony with certain impressions of the
heart, that Nature and the soul of man appear to be parts of one vast
whole; and if we separate the stage from the drama, or the drama from
the stage, the whole scene fades, and the feeling vanishes. If we take
from René the cliffs of Brittany, or the wild savannahs from Atala, the
mists of Swabia from Werther, or the sunny waves and scorched-up
hills from Paul and Virginia, we can neither understand Chateaubriand,
Bernardin de St. Pierre, or Goethe. Places and events are closely linked,
for Nature is the same in the eye as in the heart of man. We are earth's
children, and life is the same in sap as in blood; all that the earth, our
mother, feels and expresses to the eye by her form and aspect, in
melancholy or in splendor, finds an echo within us. One cannot
thoroughly enter into certain feelings, save in the spot where they first
had birth.

II.
At the entrance of Savoy, that natural labyrinth of deep valleys, which
descend like so many torrents from the Simplon, St. Bernard, and
Mount Cenis, and direct their course towards France and Switzerland,
one wider valley separates at Chambéry from the Alpine chain, and,

striking off towards Geneva and Annecy, displays its verdant bed,
intersected with lakes and rivers, between the Mont du Chat and the
almost mural mountains of Beauges.
On the left, the Mont du Chat, like a gigantic rampart, runs in one
uninterrupted ridge for the space of two leagues, marking the horizon
with a dark and scarcely undulated line. A few jagged peaks of gray
rock at the eastern extremity alone break the almost geometrical
monotony of its appearance, and tell that it was the hand of God, and
not of man, that piled up these huge masses. Towards Chambéry, the
mountain descends by gentle steps to the plain, and forms natural
terraces, clothed with walnut and chestnut trees, entwined with clusters
of the creeping vine. In the midst of this wild, luxuriant vegetation, one
sees here and there some country-house shining through the trees, the
tall spire of a humble village, or the old dark towers and battlements of
some castle of a bygone age. The plain was once a vast lake, and has
preserved the hollowed form, the indented shores, and advanced
promontories of its former aspect; but in lieu of the spreading waters,
there are the yellow waves of the bending corn, or the undulating
summit of the verdant poplars. Here and there, a piece of rising ground,
which was once an island, may be seen with its clusters of thatched
roofs, half hidden among the branches. Beyond this dried-up basin, the
Mont du Chat rises more abrupt and bold, its base washed by the waters
of a lake, as blue as the firmament above it. This lake, which is not
more than six leagues in length, varies in breadth from one to three
leagues, and is surrounded and hemmed in with bold, steep rocks on the
French side; on the Savoy side, on the contrary, it winds unmolested
into several creeks and small bays, bordered by vine-covered hillocks
and well-wooded slopes, and skirted by fig-trees whose branches dip
into its very waters. The lake then dwindles away gradually to the foot
of the rocks of Châtillon, which open to afford a passage for the
overflow of its waters into the Rhône. The burial-place of the princes of
the house of Savoy, the abbey of Haute-Combe, stands on the northern
side upon its foundation of granite, and projects the vast shadow of its
spacious cloisters on the waters of the lake. Screened during the day
from the rays of the sun by the high barrier of the Mont du Chat, the
edifice, from the obscurity which envelops it, seems emblematical of
the eternal night awaiting at its gates, the princes who descend from a

throne into its vaults. Towards