DAWN OVER THE MOOR

This morning, waking at dawn, the Padrona was impelled to roll out of bed, and look out of both her windows. The one over her balcony gives down the valley and the one opposite her bed affords her vision of the moor rolling away beyond the Dutch Garden and the terrace corner. If she had been but a woman of moderate vigour, she would not have gone to bed again till the whole pageant of mysterious glory had fulfilled itself before her eyes. For what a sight it was! First of all, the whole garden, woodland and heather hills were steeped in a translucence for which there is no name. It is a virgin hour, and its purity no words can describe. The Ling, in full bloom, was silver and amethyst on the rise, misty purple and blue in the hollows. Behind the shouldering hills a rift of sky was a radiant lemon-yellow, a kind of honey sea of light. And above that, again, little drifts of cloud had caught a wonderful orange-rose glow like the wings of cherubim about the Throne. Down the valley there were silver mists against the most tender, clear horizon; and all along the Lily Walk the clumps of Tiger Lilies seemed to be like little Fra Angelico angels, holding their breath in adoration!

Everything lies, after all, in the point of view. The dawn was decidedly too pink for safety, and the clumps of Lilies that looked so pious and recollected have got “the disease” badly in their stalks. Yet realism can never blight that exquisite hour of breaking day in her thoughts!

The only time we degenerates ever really see the dawn is coming home from some London ball; or again, travelling. The dawn in London often gives an impression of extraordinary blue in atmosphere and heaven, we suppose because it is seen contrasted with artificial illuminations. But that sapphire blue, when it permeates park and streets, when the sky seems to hold unplumbed depths beyond depths of the same wonderful colour, is a thing to dwell in the memory likewise, though travellers have the better part. Dawn in the Alps! A night not to be depicted! Such vastness of tinted heights; such black chasms where the pines hang; spume of waterfalls all golden crimson, and deep rivers, green and terrible and beautiful with a glint on them as they rush!

One of us the fourth in the lucky clover leaf at Villino Loki; one who is poet and musician besides many other things, and sometimes poet and musician together has defined the indefinable. It is not the dawn of the day she hymns, but the dawn of the young Spring.

Though the poem is printed in a recently published volume, it seems to fit naturally into this page.

Then there was a dawn over the Campagna, seen from the train that was speeding us towards Rome. A ball of red fire hung over the horizon. The sea lay silver and grey; and misty silver the Campagna.... “God made himself an awful rose of dawn,” as Tennyson sings. He did that morning: awful, yet full of a glorious comfort. The sea just caught the great reflection on its bosom.

A little later, when we came to the first ruins that precede the aqueducts, there were the white cattle, stepping about among the broken pillars, with their huge spreading horns all gilded. These had not changed since the days when the sun gleamed on the grandeurs of classic Rome. Only then yonder building—temple, or tomb, or villa—fronted the morning with a forgotten stateliness, a lost grace.

Is anything comparable to the scene that meets the traveller on his entry into Rome? Alas! St. John Lateran no longer stands like some titanic splendid ship about to slip her moorings and sail away into the wild, lonely sea of the Campagna. New walls have sprung up without the noble ancient walls; sordid disjointed lengths of streets, mean houses with blistered, leprous plaster; and evil-looking little wine-shops. Nevertheless, nothing can spoil the moment when the Lateran Church first gathers shape against the sky. All those statues with tossing gesture against the faint blue of the new day, heroic figures with outstretched arms seeming to gather pilgrims into the city; and in the midst of them the Saviour uplifting the Cross of Salvation! To the believer what a welcome! And it is Rome herself at a glance, too; for if the Church stands here beckoning between earth and sky, she is jostled below and round about by the still speaking wonders of old Pagan Rome.