There will be no one left for me to trust the King to except you, Pym. But, oh! what friends has he? He is weak, too, and loves the Queen.—Oh, my fate is nothing-nothing! But not that awful head! What must I see? It is all here. My God, how Thou wilt plague us and satiate hell! You, Pym, would help England, but through you it will become a charnel-house.' 'England, I am thine own!' answers the stern If thou exact even such a service, I obey thee to the end.' patriot. 19 SORDELLO. N In EARLY seven hundred years ago the river Mincio formed around Mantua a great marsh, which separated the city from the low mountains, covered with firs, larches, and rings of vineyard, among which stood the little castle of Goito. that lonely fortress might have been seen a slender boy, in a loose page's dress, coming every sunset to sit beside each one, in turn, of the patient, marble girls who lay or crouched beneath a cumbrous font in one of the vaults; or watching the thievish birds at work among the grapes in autumn; or lurking, in the stormy winter evenings, beside the arras, and lifting a light with both hands to the embroidered forms of the ancestors of Eccelino da Romano, surnamed il Monaco, a Ghibelline prince, whose wife, Adelaide, was mistress of Goito. Her own apartments were closed against our hero, who was known only as the orphan child of Elcorte, an archer who, soon after the boy's birth in 1194, when the Imperialists were driven out of Vicenza amid great slaughter and conflagration, had laid down his own life in saving his mistress, Adelaide, and her new-born son, afterward famous as Ecelin the Cruel. We find Sordello wandering at will over the rest of the castle, with its dim, winding stairs and maze of corridors contrived for sin, through the ravines down which slip the streamlets singing softly, and amid the forests of maples, myrtles, and evergreens, which cover the hills that look toward Mantua. His calm brow, delicate nostrils, and sharp, restless lips, show that he is 'Foremost in the regal class Nature has broadly severed from her mass Of flesh that amply lets in loveliness At eye and ear, while round the rest is furled (As though she would not trust them with her world) A veil that shows a sky not near so blue, And lets but half the sun look fervid through.' To all he saw that was lovely, he gave fresh life from his own soul. His ruling desire was to find something to worship, and bury himself in each ex * Works, 1868, v. ii. p. 19, ll. 24, &c. ternal charm; for he was not one of those strong souls which develop some new form of loveliness within to match each one that is seen without. His whole life was in his fancies. 'As the adventurous spider, making light Of distance, shoots her threads from depth to height, Fantasies forth, and in their centre swung Laughing with lucid dew-drops rainbow-edged.'* As he let his rough-hewn bow of ash sink from his aching wrist, he imagined that he had sent a golden shaft hissing through the Syrian air to strike down some defender of Jerusalem against the crusaders. As he picked grapes and filberts, he dreamed of himself as the young emperor, Frederick the Second, quaffing wine with the Soldan, or looking at the bunch of dates which the titular King of the Holy City sent his imperial son-in-law, to remind him of his promise to reconquer Palestine. Or, again, he fancied himself Apollo, slaying the Python, and wooing Delian girls. All these inferior idols soon cast off their borrowed crowns before a coming glory. One evening he stumbled by accident on Eccelino's daughter, * Ibid. p. 26, 11. 24, &c. Palma, who sat thenceforth conspicuous in his world of dreams, with her blue eyes, her rich red lips, and her tresses flowing in a gorgeous shower of gold, so that the ground was bright, as with spilt sunbeams. The servants fired his fancy by telling him how Palma had been promised by her father to the Guelf chief, Count Richard St. Boniface, one of the Capulets of Verona, and how the Ghibelline maiden rejected his suit. At last, as the first pink leaflets bud on the beech, and the larches brighten in the spring sunrise, Sordello goes forth buoyantly, hoping that to-day's adventure will secure his visioned lady, 'Whose shape divine Quivered i' the farthest rainbow-vapour, glanced On he goes through the brakes of withered fern and over the great morass, shot through and through with flashing waters, each foot-fall sending up a diamond jet. Still Palma seems floating on before him, and he thinks that when he has passed the next wood he will hear her confess her love. He clears the last screen of pine-trees before Mantua, and there, under the walls, amid a gay crowd of men and women, sits his lady, enthroned as Queen of the Court of Love, at which the trou * Ibid. p. 40, ll. 1, &c. |