Lamia

“ As a real woman, lineal indeed
From Pyrrha's pebbles or old Adam's seed.
Thus gentle Lamia judged, and judged aright,
That Lycius could not love in half a fright,
So threw the goddess off, and won his heart
More pleasantly by playing woman's part,
With no more awe than what her beauty gave,
That, while it smote, still guaranteed to save.
Lycius to all made eloquent reply,
Marrying to every word a twin-born sigh;
And last, pointing to Corinth, ask'd her sweet,
If 'twas too far that night for her soft feet. ”

“ But Veronica is worth all of us put together a hundred times over.‘
‘Quite so,’ said Lamia. ‘Veronica is our Minerva Medica, whose salutary if sometimes unpalatable wisdom keeps us in such tolerable health as moral valetudinarians like myself are capable of; whereas I am but a would-be Egeria, who have not yet succeeded in inducing any one, and you, dear Poet, least of all, to be my Numa. Still, do not judge me altogether by the way in which I conduct myself here, among a people very much after my own heart. ”

“ For by some freakful chance he made retire From his companions, and set forth to walk, Perhaps grown wearied of their Corinth talk: Over the solitary hills he fared, Thoughtless at first, but ere eve's star appeared His phantasy was lost, where reason fades, In the calm'd twilight of Platonic shades. Lamia beheld him coming, near, more near— Close to her passing, in indifference drear, His silent sandals swept the mossy green; So neighbour'd to him, and yet so unseen She stood: ”

“ Tranquil survey is not enough, and scrutinising curiosity is fatal.’
‘I am sure,’ said Lamia, ‘Veronica is not intoxicated. She is tranquillity itself.’
‘Veronica, you mean,’ was his reply,7 ‘does not effervesce. But her silence is, perhaps, the measure of her emotion.’
‘O stop! stop! I must have some of those anemones.‘ How often a kindred need of this kind arose on the part of Lamia, it would be hard to say; but, by degrees, every part of the carriage that was not occupied by ourselves was filled with tulips, windflowers, roses, and long branches of early-flowering golden acacia. ”

“ Lamia, no longer fair, there sat a deadly white.
'Shut, shut those juggling eyes, thou ruthless man!
Turn them aside, wretch! or the righteous ban
Of all the Gods, whose dreadful images
Here represent their shadowy presences,
May pierce them on the sudden with the thorn281
Of painful blindness; leaving thee forlorn,
In trembling dotage to the feeblest fright
Of conscience, for their long-offended might,
For all thine impious proud-heart sophistries,
Unlawful magic, and enticing lies. ”

“ There is no second Dante, but there are many exiles in this modern world, and I fear their number every day increases. As the struggle for existence waxes fiercer and fiercer, I think I hear them, too, exclaiming, Dona nobis pacem.‘
‘Listening first to Veronica,’ said Lamia, ‘and then to you, I am forced to the conclusion that many things are intolerable which we cannot do without. ”

“ ODE XXVI.
TO ÆLIUS LAMIA.
A friend to the Muses, I will deliver up grief and fears to the wanton winds, to waft into the Cretan Sea; singularly careless, what king of a frozen region is dreaded under the pole, or what terrifies Tiridates. [115] O sweet muse, who art delighted with pure fountains, weave together the sunny flowers, weave a chaplet for my Lamia. [116] Without thee, my praises profit nothing. To render him immortal by new strains, [117] to render him immortal by the Lesbian lyre, [118] becomes both thee and thy sisters. ”

“ Lamia was ridiculously unjust to sue a young man for a reward, who had confessed that pleasure from her in a dream which she had denied unto his awaking senses: conceiving that she had merited somewhat from his fantastical fruition and shadow of herself. If there be such debts, we owe deeply unto sympathies; but the common spirit of the world must be ready in such arrearages. ”

“ She was as though frantic with despair; her gestures, her cry very different from the formal expressions and utterances of the servile mourners.
But Lamia at length touched her, and said—
“Come away, Domitia. You cannot prevent Fate.” ”

“ Seven veils cover her, and seven are the revelations that will be made. I cannot assure thee that all will be future—some may be scenes of the past, for to the All-Seeing, the Eye of Eternity, there is neither past nor future; all is present.”
“Well, so be it,” said Lamia, “By the past we can judge the future. Let us see things that have been and we can form some notion of what is shown us as future. If the one be incorrect, then the other is untrustworthy.”
“Thou shalt behold nothing,” said the Magus, “for it is not thou who consultest me, but the lady Domitia Longina.” ”

“ Though my affection and solicitude for Lamia, mourning for his brother, lamenting inconsolably for his brother's loss, detain me; nevertheless my heart and soul carry me thither and long to break through those barriers that obstruct my way. I pronounce him the happy man who dwells in the country, you him [who lives] in the city. He to whom his neighbor's lot is agreeable, must of consequence dislike his own. Each of us is a fool for unjustly blaming the innocent place. The mind is in fault, which never escapes from itself. ”

“ LAMIA’S WINTER-QUARTERS
‘Where is Lamia?’
The inquiry is one not infrequently made; for, while most of us can vanish without being missed, some favoured individuals there are whose disappearance at once excites a sense of loss; and Lamia is one of these. The question, I need scarcely say, was put by Veronica ”

“ We none of us, unless it be Veronica sometimes, resent Lamia’s seemingly irrelevant way of diverting a discussion, and the Poet has less reason than any of us to do so, since she not only accepts his utterances as words of absolute wisdom, but invariably strives to shape herself according to his canons of life and conduct. Accordingly, when we descended into Florence, which was pretty often, she manifested neither impatience nor curiosity, but suffered herself to fall into the fortuitous fashion of wandering about it that he recommended. ”

“ And keep a cloister in my heart.’
‘One is constantly confuting oneself,’ he replied.
‘How should it be otherwise?’ said Lamia. ‘Verse being the expression, not of the convictions, but of the emotions, poets cannot be taxed with inconsistency, though they contradict themselves a thousand times.’
‘Thank you, dear Lamia,’ he said. ‘You are the most ingenious of apologists. ”

“ But certainly it is not true of Veronica, nor yet, I think, of Lamia. Indeed, speaking generally, I think one ought to entertain one’s friends with a record of one’s happiness rather than with a recital of one’s woes; but it does not follow, does it, that there is no pathetic minor in one’s life because one is not always sounding it? Indeed, amid all the enchantments of that Italian season when Spring and Summer are indistinguishable, we had been conscious of the shadow of pain which is cast by the surely approaching extinction of a young life in one’s own immediate precincts ”

“ And uttering these words with all sorts of affected airs and simperings, Lamia took a little significant peep in a small mirror of cast metal which she drew from her bosom, and which enabled her to lead back to duty certain wandering curls disarranged by the impertinence of the wind.
"As to the double pupil, that seems to me nothing more than an old nurse's tale," observed the well-informed patrician; "but it is a fact that Nyssia's eyes are so piercing that she can see through walls. Lynxes are myopic compared with her."
"How can a sensible man coolly argue about such an absurdity?" ”

“ I hope everybody knows that, in making coffee, that is exactly what it should not be allowed to do; and I fear Lamia had a malicious pleasure in finding Veronica for once at fault. I cannot but suppose that Veronica had heard the foregoing story many times before, but she catches fire so readily from any one’s enthusiasm for Italy, that she had almost allowed the coffee to do the same. ”

“ If so, I will never show my face in England or New York again!” exclaimed Lamia, losing all decent self-control and becoming hysterical, not from anxious affection, but from alarmed pride.
“Compose yourself, madam. There is no murder on his hands. There is nothing but what you may get over in the peace of your father’s house,” said Will Walling. ”

“ Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine— Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade. ”

“ I verily believe that something, moreover, should be ascribed to the comparative slenderness of our purse and to the simplicity of our tastes; nor do I pretend that what Lamia flatteringly called a paradise regained would have been much short of a purgatory to many splendidly-fastidious people. Our new abode had neither architectural design nor internal pretension; but the taste of man, in partnership with time, had given it charm without and refinement within. ”

“ The enigma was explained when Lorenzo said to him, “You are now one of ourselves, and as one of ourselves I treat you. My grandsire Cosimo used to say to his sons,77 ‘Remember you are only citizens of Florence, and must reserve what splendours you can command for the glorification of the City.’ As his descendant, I obey his injunction.”‘
‘Hark!’ I said. ‘Already there are sounds of modern civilisation. The grass-plot is being mown.’
Lamia and the Poet listened, though I think the latter at once guessed my meaning.
‘What is it?’ said Lamia. ‘A mowing-machine? I cannot hear it. ”

“ There are no half measures with such a people. They must be exterminated. Jerusalem must be laid waste to the very foundation. Perchance, old as I am, it may be granted me to behold the day when her walls shall fall and the flames shall envelop her houses, when her inhabitants shall pass under the edge of the sword, when salt shall be strown on the place where once the temple stood. And in that day I shall at length be justified.”
Lamia exerted himself to lead the conversation back to a less acrimonious note. ”

“ She quickly made me repent my question. ‘You are unteachable. Love is a terminable annuity, that ends long before death, leaving one’s declining days to abject poverty.‘
At this juncture I saw Veronica and the Poet coming along the rose pergola, for January roses were pretty abundant with us, and I inwardly wished they had come sooner, for Lamia would not have dared to say such things in their presence; reserving, as she seems to do, her most outrageous utterances for my private benefit. But then, it is true, I should not in that case have put my useless interrogatories. ”

“ It lacks human interest. When it smiles, it enchants. When it frowns, it overawes. But we cannot take it to our heart; and something of the heartlessness of the sea attaches to a land where neither poet, architect, nor painter has bequeathed monuments to remind us that here man has aspired and striven, here woman consoled and suffered. But be patient, Lamia. Florence is reserving for you ample compensation.‘
‘And yet you, or Veronica, at least,’ said Lamia, 54 ‘would not let us take up our quarters at or even near,—but perhaps I had better not mention the place. ”

“ They will do anything on earth for you, if you go the right way about it; but they will not be turned into machines. Nothing I have ever seen in Veronica is more admirable, or shows so conclusively the discrimination she can blend with her love of order, than the amount of method, limited no doubt but quite unusual, with which, for the time at least, she imbued those about us; and Lamia, as we have seen, indulged in a little characteristic raillery on the subject.
‘It is all very well,’ said the Poet, ‘for us to have our little joke about a certain person’s passion for discipline. ”

“ But indeed every great poet is the lineal descendant of every other great poet. At any given moment, what exercises most influence is, not the present, but the Past. I ventured, the other day, to observe that there are only two sorts of people, the noble and the ignoble. Dear Lamia, let us try to belong to the noble, since every one may be a member of that untitled aristocracy ”

“ I made some observation of the kind to Veronica, imagining we were alone, and got for reply,—
‘My dear, you will never understand women.’
‘How is it possible,’ I asked, a little nettled by the implied rebuke,162 ‘when no two women are alike?’
‘No one woman is alike,’ said Lamia, suddenly emerging from a luxuriance of leaf and flower that had concealed her from view; and, though Veronica was there to disprove the universal application of her aphorism, I think she spoke from the very depths of her own inner consciousness. ”

“ Lycius meets her in the wood, is smitten with love for her and goes with her to her enchanted palace, where the wedding is celebrated with great splendour. But suddenly Apollonius the magician appears; he reveals the magic. Lamia again assumes the form of a serpent, the enchanted palace vanishes, and Lycius is found lifeless.
The music commences with a sinister theme, Lento misterioso, con tristezza, given out by bassoon and celli, accompanied by a soft drum roll. This motive is the main one of the work, and may be regarded as that of Lamia. ”

“ Lamia declared that Nyssia dared not uncover her face for fear of showing her double pupil. The young libertine remained convinced that Theano of Colophon was more beautiful than the queen of Sardes; and Gyges sighed when he beheld Nyssia, after having made her elephant kneel down, descend upon the inclined heads of Damascus slaves as upon a living ladder, to the threshold of the royal dwelling, where the elegance of Greek architecture was blended with the fantasies and enormities of Asiatic taste. ”