288 PRÆTERITA-II

50. For full ten years, since earliest geologic reading, I had thoroughly known the structure and present look of Vesuvius and Monte Somma; nor had Friendship’s Offering and Forget-me-not, in the days of the Bandit Leoni,¹ left me without useful notions of the Bay of Naples. But the beautiful forms of Monte St. Angelo and Capri were new to me, and the first feeling of being in the presence of the power and mystery of the under earth, unspeakably solemn; though Vesuvius was virtually in repose, and the slow changes in the heaped white cloud above the crater were only like those of a thunder cloud.

The first sight of the Alps had been to me as a direct revelation of the benevolent will in creation. Long since, in the volcanic powers of destruction, I had been taught by Homer, and further forced by my own reason, to see, if not the personality of an Evil Spirit, at all events the permitted symbol of evil, unredeemed; wholly distinct from the conditions of storm, or heat, or frost, on which the healthy courses of organic life depended. In the same literal way in which the snows and Alpine roses of Lauter-brunnen were visible Paradise, here, in the valley of ashes and throat of lava, were visible Hell. If thus in the natural, how else should it be in the spiritual world?

I had never yet read a line of Dante. From the moment when I knew the words,-

“It now is evening there, where buried lies

The body in which I cast a shade, removed

To Naples from Brundusium’s wall,”²

not Naples only, but Italy, became for ever flushed with the sacred twilight of them. But even now, what pieces

and growls at the character of the Neapolitan and general recklessness and misery of government and people. In all these I was entirely right, and perceived, in a way utterly different from the common traveller, the discord between the beauty of external scene and the sorrow of its people. But also, I saw the scene itself, as had already become my wont, with precise note of its faults. The common English traveller...” (§ 51).]

¹ [See above, p. 180.]

² [Purgatorio, iii. 25. For another reference to the Tomb of Virgil, see Vol. XXV. p. 350 and n.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]