When it came to the point of quitting the reposeful life of Monte Beni,

the sculptor was not without regrets, and would willingly have dreamed a

little longer of the sweet paradise on earth that Hilda's presence

there might make. Nevertheless, amid all its repose, he had begun to be

sensible of a restless melancholy, to which the cultivators of the ideal

arts are more liable than sturdier men. On his own part, therefore, and

leaving Donatello out of the case, he would have judged it well to go.

He made parting visits to the legendary dell, and to other delightful

spots with which he had grown familiar; he climbed the tower again, and

saw a sunset and a moonrise over the great valley; he drank, on the

eve of his departure, one flask, and then another, of the Monte Beni

Sunshine, and stored up its flavor in his memory as the standard of what

is exquisite in wine. These things accomplished, Kenyon was ready for

the journey.

Donatello had not very easily been stirred out of the peculiar

sluggishness, which enthralls and bewitches melancholy people. He had

offered merely a passive resistance, however, not an active one, to his

friend's schemes; and when the appointed hour came, he yielded to the

impulse which Kenyon failed not to apply; and was started upon the

journey before he had made up his mind to undertake it. They wandered

forth at large, like two knights-errant, among the valleys, and the

mountains, and the old mountain towns of that picturesque and

lovely region. Save to keep the appointment with Miriam, a fortnight

thereafter, in the great square of Perugia, there was nothing more

definite in the sculptor's plan than that they should let themselves

be blown hither and thither like Winged seeds, that mount upon each

wandering breeze. Yet there was an idea of fatality implied in the

simile of the winged seeds which did not altogether suit Kenyon's fancy;

for, if you look closely into the matter, it will be seen that whatever

appears most vagrant, and utterly purposeless, turns out, in the end,

to have been impelled the most surely on a preordained and unswerving

track. Chance and change love to deal with men's settled plans, not with

their idle vagaries. If we desire unexpected and unimaginable events,

we should contrive an iron framework, such as we fancy may compel the

future to take one inevitable shape; then comes in the unexpected, and

shatters our design in fragments.

The travellers set forth on horseback, and purposed to perform much of

their aimless journeyings under the moon, and in the cool of the morning

or evening twilight; the midday sun, while summer had hardly begun to

trail its departing skirts over Tuscany, being still too fervid to allow

of noontide exposure.

For a while, they wandered in that same broad valley which Kenyon had

viewed with such delight from the Monte Beni tower. The sculptor soon

began to enjoy the idle activity of their new life, which the lapse of

a day or two sufficed to establish as a kind of system; it is so natural

for mankind to be nomadic, that a very little taste of that primitive

mode of existence subverts the settled habits of many preceding years.

Kenyon's cares, and whatever gloomy ideas before possessed him, seemed

to be left at Monte Beni, and were scarcely remembered by the time

that its gray tower grew undistinguishable on the brown hillside. His

perceptive faculties, which had found little exercise of late, amid so

thoughtful a way of life, became keen, and kept his eyes busy with a

hundred agreeable scenes.




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