melancholy shades, he perceives, at a distance, a pair of solitary ghosts, who seem to be devoured with a still severer anguish, and, in their altered forms, which seem, as he says, to be tossing about like straws in the wind, he recognises, with a shudder of horror, the faded features of Francesca and her lover.
"Soon as the wind had in its sweeping brought
Them near to me, I cried, 'ye wretched souls,
O! come and speak with us, deny not this;
As doves which plunge with open wings and firm
From Ether down into their joyful nest,
Obedient to the sudden call of love,
So came they gliding from that woful band
Where Dido is, swift through the sullen air,
Such was the strength of that impassionate cry.
Then she, 'kind mortal, visitant of hell,
Could we, the inhabitants of these sad seats,
Have ought of power with the eternal king,
Prayers should we offer for thy gentle soul,
Which hath such pity on our matchless ills;
We will both hear and speak to thee of that
Which is thy pleasure, while the stormy wind,
Our master, is so hushed.
My native land
Is that by the sea-shore, where Po comes down
With all his turbulent train to seek repose
In ocean's calmnes.—Love, which ever finds
In noble spirits an easy prey, seized him;[1]
He loved that beauteous form which once was mine,
And ta'en from me unjustly. I loved him,
And love him still; Love wrought the death of both:
But Cain expects our murderer far beneath
In his deep gulph of fratricidal woe.'
So spake she. I stood listening all the while,
With countenance bent down. I could not bear
To look on that frail lady. But at length,
'Alas!' said I, 'what sweet thoughts, what desires
Were those which brought them to these realms of grief?
Believe me, O! Francesca, I am sad
To tears when I behold thy spirit's pain;
But tell me, in your season of sweet sighs,
O! when or how did you conceive these flames,
And give your souls up to unlawful love?'
Then she to me—'there is no greater grief
Than is the memory of happy times,
In misery, as well thy guide[2] can say;
But if thou fain wouldst hear of the first rise
Of all this guilt, I will speak out to thee
As one that weeps and tells. We read one day
Of Launcelot, and how love mastered him;
We were alone, suspicious thoughts were none,—
And sundry times our eyes bent down, and cheeks
Were coloured in our reading. But one point,
One fatal point, it was which overcame:
'Twas when we read of the queen's lovely smile
When first her true knight kissed her. Then my Paolo
(Whom God ne'er take from me, even here in hell),
He kiss'd my mouth, all trembling. Sweet that book,
And he that wrote it. But we read therein
That day no farther.'
While the one poor ghost
Spake so, the other lifted up a voice
So full of misery and bewailing shrieks,
That I, with pity overcome, grew faint,
And fell down like a dead man at their feet."[3]
The moral purpose of the question, and the deep pathos of the reply, can stand in need of no comment. But Mr Hunt has shewn very little judgment in borrowing the tale so closely from Dante, and yet entirely omitting all those circumstances in the great Poet's narrative, which render the introduction, as well as the description of that passionate scene, at once so natural and so impressive. We listen without offence to the pale miserable spectre, who is condemned to add to her own wretchedness by the intense exactness of her recollection. But we cannot pardon the same thirds in a poet who takes the story of Francesca from her mouth into his own, and gives us that as a gratuitous effusion of his imagination, which was originally an agonized dream of self-torturing memory.
—"Paolo, by degrees, gently embraced,
With one permitted arm, her lovely waist;
And both their cheeks, like peaches on a tree,
Leaned with a touch together thrillingly;
And o'er the book they hung, and nothing said,
And every lingering page grew longer as they read.
As thus they sat, and felt, with leaps of heart,
Their colour change, they came upon the part
Where fond Geneura, with her flame long nurst,
Smiled upon Launcelot when he kissed her first:—
That touch, at last, through every fibre slid,
And Paolo turned, scarce knowing what he did,—
Only he felt he could no more dissemble,
And kissed her, mouth to mouth, all in a tremble.
Sad were those hearts, and sweet was that long kiss:
Sacred be love from sight, whate'er it is.
