The Lifted Veil | Page 6

But the poet's sensibility without his voice--the poet's
sensibility that finds no vent but in silent tears on the sunny bank, when
the noonday light sparkles on the water, or in an inward shudder at the
sound of harsh human tones, the sight of a cold human eye--this dumb
passion brings with it a fatal solitude of soul in the society of one's
fellow-men. My least solitary moments were those in which I pushed
off in my boat, at evening, towards the centre of the lake; it seemed to
me that the sky, and the glowing mountain-tops, and the wide blue
water, surrounded me with a cherishing love such as no human face had
shed on me since my mother's love had vanished out of my life. I used
to do as Jean Jacques did--lie down in my boat and let it glide where it
would, while I looked up at the departing glow leaving one
mountain-top after the other, as if the prophet's chariot of fire were
passing over them on its way to the home of light. Then, when the
white summits were all sad and corpse-like, I had to push homeward,
for I was under careful surveillance, and was allowed no late
wanderings. This disposition of mine was not favourable to the
formation of intimate friendships among the numerous youths of my
own age who are always to be found studying at Geneva. Yet I made
ONE such friendship; and, singularly enough, it was with a youth
whose intellectual tendencies were the very reverse of my own. I shall
call him Charles Meunier; his real surname--an English one, for he was
of English extraction--having since become celebrated. He was an
orphan, who lived on a miserable pittance while he pursued the medical
studies for which he had a special genius. Strange! that with my vague
mind, susceptible and unobservant, hating inquiry and given up to
contemplation, I should have been drawn towards a youth whose
strongest passion was science. But the bond was not an intellectual one;
it came from a source that can happily blend the stupid with the
brilliant, the dreamy with the practical: it came from community of

feeling. Charles was poor and ugly, derided by Genevese gamins, and
not acceptable in drawing-rooms. I saw that he was isolated, as I was,
though from a different cause, and, stimulated by a sympathetic
resentment, I made timid advances towards him. It is enough to say that
there sprang up as much comradeship between us as our different habits
would allow; and in Charles's rare holidays we went up the Saleve
together, or took the boat to Vevay, while I listened dreamily to the
monologues in which he unfolded his bold conceptions of future
experiment and discovery. I mingled them confusedly in my thought
with glimpses of blue water and delicate floating cloud, with the notes
of birds and the distant glitter of the glacier. He knew quite well that
my mind was half absent, yet he liked to talk to me in this way; for
don't we talk of our hopes and our projects even to dogs and birds,
when they love us? I have mentioned this one friendship because of its
connexion with a strange and terrible scene which I shall have to
narrate in my subsequent life.
This happier life at Geneva was put an end to by a severe illness, which
is partly a blank to me, partly a time of dimly-remembered suffering,
with the presence of my father by my bed from time to time. Then
came the languid monotony of convalescence, the days gradually
breaking into variety and distinctness as my strength enabled me to
take longer and longer drives. On one of these more vividly
remembered days, my father said to me, as he sat beside my sofa -
"When you are quite well enough to travel, Latimer, I shall take you
home with me. The journey will amuse you and do you good, for I shall
go through the Tyrol and Austria, and you will see many new places.
Our neighbours, the Filmores, are come; Alfred will join us at Basle,
and we shall all go together to Vienna, and back by Prague" . . .
My father was called away before he had finished his sentence, and he
left my mind resting on the word PRAGUE, with a strange sense that a
new and wondrous scene was breaking upon me: a city under the broad
sunshine, that seemed to me as if it were the summer sunshine of a
long-past century arrested in its course--unrefreshed for ages by dews
of night, or the rushing rain-cloud; scorching the dusty, weary,

time-eaten grandeur of a people doomed to live on in the stale
repetition of memories, like deposed and superannuated kings