"And that little ridge of stone," says my companion, " - do you see it,
jutting into the fields down there? It has a queer name. We call it La
Sirena."
La Sirena....
It is good to live in a land where such memories cling to old rocks.
By what a chance has the name survived to haunt this inland crag,
defying geological changes, outlasting the generations of men, their
creeds and tongues and races! How it takes one back - back into hoary
antiquity, into another landscape altogether! One thinks of those Greek
mariners coasting past this promontory, and pouring libations to the
Siren into an ocean on whose untrampled floor the countryman now sows
his rice and turnips.
Paganisme immortel, es-tu mort? On le dit.
Mais Pan, tout bas, s'en moque, et la Sirene en rit.
They are still here, both sea and Siren; they have only agreed to
separate for a while. The ocean shines out yonder in all its luminous
splendour of old. And the Siren, too, can be found by those to whom the
gods are kind.
My Siren dwells at Corsanico.
Viareggio (May)
Those Sirens! They have called me back, after nearly three months in
Florence, to that village on the hill-top. Nothing but smiles up there.
And never was Corsanico more charming, all drenched in sunlight and
pranked out with fresh green. On this fourteenth of May, I said to
myself, I am wont to attend a certain yearly festival far away, and
there enjoy myself prodigiously. Yet - can it be possible? - I am even
happier here. Seldom does the event surpass one's hopes.
Later than usual, long after sunset, under olives already heavy-laden,
through patches of high-standing corn and beans, across the little
brook, past that familiar and solitary farmhouse, I descended to the
canal, in full content. Another golden moment of life! Strong
exhalations rose up from the swampy soil, that teemed and steamed under
the hot breath of spring; the pond-like water, once so bare, was
smothered under a riot of monstrous marsh-plants and loud with the music
of love-sick frogs. Stars were reflected on its surface.
Star-gazing, my Star? Would I were Heaven, to gaze on thee with many
eyes.
Such was my mood, a Hellenic mood, a mood summed up in that one word
[Greek: tetelestai] - not to be taken, however, in the sense of "all's
over." Quite the reverse! Did Shelley ever walk in like humour along
this canal? I doubt it. He lacked the master-key. An evangelist of a
kind, he was streaked, for all his paganism, with the craze of
world-improvement. One day he escaped from his chains into those
mountains and there beheld a certain Witch - only to be called back to
mortality by a domestic and critic-bitten lady.
