The Marble Faun Volume 2 - Page 53/157

From all these people there comes a babblement that seems quite

disproportioned to the number of tongues that make it. So many words are

not uttered in a New England village throughout the year--except it

be at a political canvass or town-meeting--as are spoken here, with no

especial purpose, in a single day. Neither so many words, nor so much

laughter; for people talk about nothing as if they were terribly

in earnest, and make merry at nothing as if it were the best of all

possible jokes. In so long a time as they have existed, and within such

narrow precincts, these little walled towns are brought into a closeness

of society that makes them but a larger household. All the inhabitants

are akin to each, and each to all; they assemble in the street as their

common saloon, and thus live and die in a familiarity of intercourse,

such as never can be known where a village is open at either end, and

all roundabout, and has ample room within itself.

Stuck up beside the door of one house, in this village street, is a

withered bough; and on a stone seat, just under the shadow of the

bough, sits a party of jolly drinkers, making proof of the new wine, or

quaffing the old, as their often-tried and comfortable friend. Kenyon

draws bridle here (for the bough, or bush, is a symbol of the wine-shop

at this day in Italy, as it was three hundred years ago in England), and

calls for a goblet of the deep, mild, purple juice, well diluted with

water from the fountain. The Sunshine of Monte Beni would be welcome

now. Meanwhile, Donatello has ridden onward, but alights where a shrine,

with a burning lamp before it, is built into the wall of an inn stable.

He kneels and crosses himself, and mutters a brief prayer, without

attracting notice from the passers-by, many of whom are parenthetically

devout in a similar fashion. By this time the sculptor has drunk off his

wine-and-water, and our two travellers resume their way, emerging from

the opposite gate of the village.

Before them, again, lies the broad valley, with a mist so thinly

scattered over it as to be perceptible only in the distance, and most so

in the nooks of the hills. Now that we have called it mist, it seems

a mistake not rather to have called it sunshine; the glory of so much

light being mingled with so little gloom, in the airy material of that

vapor. Be it mist or sunshine, it adds a touch of ideal beauty to the

scene, almost persuading the spectator that this valley and those hills

are visionary, because their visible atmosphere is so like the substance

of a dream.

Immediately about them, however, there were abundant tokens that the

country was not really the paradise it looked to be, at a casual glance.

Neither the wretched cottages nor the dreary farmhouses seemed to

partake of the prosperity, with which so kindly a climate, and so

fertile a portion of Mother Earth's bosom, should have filled them, one

and all. But possibly the peasant inhabitants do not exist in so grimy

a poverty, and in homes so comfortless, as a stranger, with his native

ideas of those matters, would be likely to imagine. The Italians appear

to possess none of that emulative pride which we see in our New England

villages, where every householder, according to his taste and

means, endeavors to make his homestead an ornament to the grassy

and elm-shadowed wayside. In Italy there are no neat doorsteps

and thresholds; no pleasant, vine-sheltered porches; none of those

grass-plots or smoothly shorn lawns, which hospitably invite the

imagination into the sweet domestic interiors of English life.

Everything, however sunny and luxuriant may be the scene around, is

especially disheartening in the immediate neighborhood of an Italian

home.