The Moon Endureth | Page 4

Finds the great rest that wanderers
seek! Grant me the joy of wind and brine, The zest of food, the taste of
wine, The fighter's strength, the echoing strife The high tumultuous
lists of life-- May I ne'er lag, nor hapless fall, Nor weary at the
battle-call!... But when the even brings surcease, Grant me the happy
moorland peace; That in my heart's depth ever lie That ancient land of
heath and sky, Where the old rhymes and stories fall In kindly,
soothing pastoral. There in the hills grave silence lies, And Death
himself wears friendly guise There be my lot, my twilight stage, Dear
city of my pilgrimage.

THE COMPANY OF THE MARJOLAINE
I
"Qu'est-c'qui passe ici si tard, Compagnons de la Marjolaine,"
-CHANSONS DE FRANCE
...I came down from the mountain and into the pleasing valley of the
Adige in as pelting a heat as ever mortal suffered under. The way
underfoot was parched and white; I had newly come out of a wilderness
of white limestone crags, and a sun of Italy blazed blindingly in an
azure Italian sky. You are to suppose, my dear aunt, that I had had
enough and something more of my craze for foot-marching. A fortnight
ago I had gone to Belluno in a post-chaise, dismissed my fellow to
carry my baggage by way of Verona, and with no more than a valise on
my back plunged into the fastnesses of those mountains. I had a fancy
to see the little sculptured hills which made backgrounds for
Gianbellini, and there were rumours of great mountains built wholly of
marble which shone like the battlements.
...1 This extract from the unpublished papers of the Manorwater family
has seemed to the Editor worth printing for its historical interest. The
famous Lady Molly Carteron became Countess of Manorwater by her
second marriage. She was a wit and a friend of wits, and her nephew,
the Honourable Charles Hervey-Townshend (afterwards our
Ambassador at The Hague), addressed to her a series of amusing letters
while making, after the fashion of his contemporaries, the Grand Tour
of Europe. Three letters, written at various places in the Eastern Alps
and despatched from Venice, contain the following short narrative....

of the Celestial City. So at any rate reported young Mr. Wyndham, who
had travelled with me from Milan to Venice. I lay the first night at
Pieve, where Titian had the fortune to be born, and the landlord at the
inn displayed a set of villainous daubs which he swore were the early
works of that master. Thence up a toilsome valley I journeyed to the
Ampezzan country, valley where indeed I saw my white mountains, but,
alas! no longer Celestial. For it rained like Westmorland for five
endless days, while I kicked my heels in an inn and turned a canto of
Aristo into halting English couplets. By-and-by it cleared, and I headed
westward towards Bozen, among the tangle of rocks where the Dwarf
King had once his rose-garden. The first night I had no inn but slept in
the vile cabin of a forester, who spoke a tongue half Latin, half Dutch,
which I failed to master. The next day was a blaze of heat, the
mountain-paths lay thick with dust, and I had no wine from sunrise to
sunset. Can you wonder that, when the following noon I saw Santa
Chiara sleeping in its green circlet of meadows, my thought was only
of a deep draught and a cool chamber? I protest that I am a great lover
of natural beauty, of rock and cascade, and all the properties of the poet:
but the enthusiasm of Rousseau himself would sink from the stars to
earth if he had marched since breakfast in a cloud of dust with a throat
like the nether millstone.
Yet I had not entered the place before Romance revived. The little
town--a mere wayside halting-place on the great mountain-road to the
North--had the air of mystery which foretells adventure. Why is it that a
dwelling or a countenance catches the fancy with the promise of some
strange destiny? I have houses in my mind which I know will some day
and somehow be intertwined oddly with my life; and I have faces in
memory of which I know nothing--save that I shall undoubtedly cast
eyes again upon them. My first glimpses of Santa Chiara gave me this
earnest of romance. It was walled and fortified, the streets were narrow
pits of shade, old tenements with bent fronts swayed to meet each other.
Melons lay drying on flat roofs, and yet now and then would come a
high-pitched northern gable. Latin and Teuton met and mingled in the
place, and, as Mr. Gibbon has taught us, the offspring of this admixture
is something fantastic