Perhaps even thus the poetry of the Past rings on our ears--the deeper and the diviner, because removed from the clay which made the poets. O Art, Art! how dost thou beautify and exalt us; what is nature without thee!"
"You are a poet, Signor," said a soft clear voice beside the soliloquist; and Maltravers started to find that he had had unknowingly a listener in the young Cesarini.
"No," said Maltravers; "I cull the flowers, I do not cultivate the soil."
"And why not?" said Cesarini, with abrupt energy; "you are an Englishman--/you/ have a public--you have a country--you have a living stage, a breathing audience; we, Italians, have nothing but the dead."
As he looked on the young man, Maltravers was surprised to see the sudden animation which glowed upon his pale features.
"You asked me a question I would fain put to you," said the Englishman, after a pause. "/You/, methinks, are a poet?"
"I have fancied that I might be one. But poetry with us is a bird in the wilderness--it sings from an impulse--the song dies without a listener. Oh that I belonged to a /living/ country,--France, England, Germany, Arnerica,--and not to the corruption of a dead giantess--for such is now the land of the ancient lyre."
"Let us meet again, and soon," said Maltravers, holding out his hand.
Cesarini hesitated a moment, and then accepted and returned the proffered salutation. Reserved as he was, something in Maltravers attracted him; and, indeed, there was that in Ernest which fascinated most of those unhappy eccentrics who do not move in the common orbit of the world.
In a few moments more the Englishman had said farewell to the owner of the villa, and his light boat skimmed rapidly over the tide.
"What do you think of the /Inglese/?" said Madame de Montaigne to her husband, as they turned towards the house. (They said not a word about the Milanese.)
"He has a noble bearing for one so young," said the Frenchman; "and seems to have seen the world, and both to have profited and to have suffered by it."
"He will prove an acquisition to our society here," returned Teresa; "he interests me; and you, Castruccio?" turning to seek for her brother; but Cesarini had already, with his usual noiseless step, disappeared within the house.
"Alas, my poor brother!" she said, "I cannot comprehend him. What does he desire?"
"Fame!" replied De Montaigne, calmly. "It is a vain shadow; no wonder that he disquiets himself in vain."
CHAPTER II.
"Alas! what boots it with incessant care To strictly meditate the thankless Muse; Were I not better done as others use, To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair?" MILTON'S /Lycidas/.
THERE is nothing more salutary to active men than occasional intervals of repose,--when we look within, instead of without, and examine almost /insensibly/ (for I hold strict and conscious self-scrutiny a thing much rarer than we suspect)--what we have done--what we are capable of doing. It is settling, as it were, a debtor and creditor account with the past, before we plunge into new speculations. Such an interval of repose did Maltravers now enjoy. In utter solitude, so far as familiar companionship is concerned, he had for several weeks been making himself acquainted with his own character and mind. He read and thought much, but without any exact or defined object. I think it is Montaigne who says somewhere: "People talk about thinking--but for my part I never think, except when I sit down to write." I believe this is not a very common case, for people who don't write think as well as people who do; but connected, severe, well-developed thought, in contradistinction to vague meditation, must be connected with some tangible plan or object; and therefore we must be either writing men or acting men, if we desire to test the logic, and unfold into symmetrical design the fused colours of our reasoning faculty. Maltravers did not yet feel this, but he was sensible of some intellectual want. His ideas, his memories, his dreams crowded thick and confused upon him; he wished to arrange them in order, and he could not. He was overpowered by the unorganised affluence of his own imagination and intellect. He had often, even as a child, fancied that he was formed to do something in the world, but he had never steadily considered what it was to be, whether he was to become a man of books or a man of deeds. He had written poetry when it poured irresistibly from the fount of emotion within, but looked at his effusions with a cold and neglectful eye when the enthusiasm had passed away.
Maltravers was not much gnawed by the desire of fame--perhaps few men of real genius are, until artificially worked up to it. There is in a sound and correct intellect, with all its gifts fairly balanced, a calm consciousness of power, a certainty that when its strength is fairly put out, it must be to realise the usual result of strength. Men of second-rate faculties, on the contrary, are fretful and nervous, fidgeting after a celebrity which they do not estimate by their own talents, but by the talents of some one else.