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.