The final charm is bestowed by the malaria. There is a piercing,

thrilling, delicious kind of regret in the idea of so much beauty thrown

away, or only enjoyable at its half-development, in winter and early

spring, and never to be dwelt amongst, as the home scenery of any human

being. For if you come hither in summer, and stray through these glades

in the golden sunset, fever walks arm in arm with you, and death awaits

you at the end of the dim vista. Thus the scene is like Eden in its

loveliness; like Eden, too, in the fatal spell that removes it beyond

the scope of man's actual possessions. But Donatello felt nothing of

this dream-like melancholy that haunts the spot. As he passed among the

sunny shadows, his spirit seemed to acquire new elasticity. The flicker

of the sunshine, the sparkle of the fountain's gush, the dance of the

leaf upon the bough, the woodland fragrance, the green freshness,

the old sylvan peace and freedom, were all intermingled in those long

breaths which he drew.

The ancient dust, the mouldiness of Rome, the dead atmosphere in which

he had wasted so many months, the hard pavements, the smell of ruin and

decaying generations, the chill palaces, the convent bells, the heavy

incense of altars, the life that he had led in those dark, narrow

streets, among priests, soldiers, nobles, artists, and women,--all the

sense of these things rose from the young man's consciousness like a

cloud which had darkened over him without his knowing how densely.

He drank in the natural influences of the scene, and was intoxicated as

by an exhilarating wine. He ran races with himself along the gleam and

shadow of the wood-paths. He leapt up to catch the overhanging bough of

an ilex, and swinging himself by it alighted far onward, as if he had

flown thither through the air. In a sudden rapture he embraced the

trunk of a sturdy tree, and seemed to imagine it a creature worthy of

affection and capable of a tender response; he clasped it closely in his

arms, as a Faun might have clasped the warm feminine grace of the nymph,

whom antiquity supposed to dwell within that rough, encircling rind.

Then, in order to bring himself closer to the genial earth, with which

his kindred instincts linked him so strongly, he threw himself at full

length on the turf, and pressed down his lips, kissing the violets and

daisies, which kissed him back again, though shyly, in their maiden

fashion.

While he lay there, it was pleasant to see how the green and blue

lizards, who had beta basking on some rock or on a fallen pillar that

absorbed the warmth of the sun, scrupled not to scramble over him with

their small feet; and how the birds alighted on the nearest twigs and

sang their little roundelays unbroken by any chirrup of alarm; they

recognized him, it may be, as something akin to themselves, or else they

fancied that he was rooted and grew there; for these wild pets of nature

dreaded him no more in his buoyant life than if a mound of soil and

grass and flowers had long since covered his dead body, converting it

back to the sympathies from which human existence had estranged it.




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