The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 27, January, 1860

The great festival of the Bifana (a corruption, undoubtedly, of Epifania) takes place on the Eve of Twelfth-Night, in the Piazza di San Eustachio,—and a curious spectacle it is. The Piazza itself, (which is situated in the centre of the city, just beyond the Pantheon,) and all the adjacent streets, are lined with booths covered with every kind of plaything for children. Most of these are of Roman make, very rudely fashioned, and very cheap; but for those who have longer purses, there are not wanting heaps of German and French toys. These booths are gayly illuminated with rows of candles and the three-wicked brass lucerne of Rome; and, at intervals, painted posts are set into the pavement, crowned with pans of grease, with a wisp of tow for wick, which blaze and flare about. Besides these, numbers of torches carried about by hand lend a wavering and picturesque light to the scene. By eight o'clock in the evening, crowds begin to fill the Piazza and the adjacent streets. Long before one arrives, the squeak of penny-trumpets is heard at intervals; but in the Piazza itself the mirth is wild and furious, and the din that salutes one's ears on entering is almost deafening. The object of every one is to make as much noise as possible, and every kind of instrument for this purpose is sold at the booths. There are drums beating, tamburelli thumping and jingling, pipes squeaking, watchmen's-rattles clacking, penny-trumpets and tin horns shrilling, and the sharpest whistles shrieking everywhere. Besides this, there are the din of voices, screams of laughter, and the confused burr and buzz of a great crowd. On all sides you are saluted by the strangest noises. Instead of being spoken to, you are whistled at. Companies of people are marching together in platoons, or piercing through the crowd in long files, and dancing and blowing like mad on their instruments. It is a perfect witches' Sabbath. Here, huge dolls dressed as Polichinello or Pantaloon are borne about for sale,—or over the heads of the crowd great black-faced jumping-jacks, lifted on a stick, twitch themselves in fantastic fits,—or, what is more Roman than all, men carry about long poles strung with rings of hundreds of giambelli, (a light cake, called jumble in English,) which they scream for sale at a mezzo baiocco each. There is no alternative but to get a drum, whistle, or trumpet, and join in the racket,—and to fill one's pockets with toys for the children and absurd presents for one's older friends. The moment you are once in for it, and making as much noise as you can, you begin to relish the jest. The toys are very odd,—particularly the Roman whistles;—some of these are made of pewter, with a little wheel that whirls as you blow; others are of terra-cotta, very rudely modelled into every shape of bird, beast, and human deformity, each with a whistle in its head, breast, or tail, which it is no joke to hear, when blown close to your ears by a stout pair of lungs. The scene is very picturesque. Above, the dark vault of night, with its far stars, the blazing and flaring of lights below, and the great, dark walls of the Sapienza and Church looking grimly down upon the mirth. Everywhere in the crowd are the glistening helmets of soldiers, who are mixing in the sport, and the chapeaux of white-strapped gendarmes, standing at intervals to keep the peace. At about half-past eleven o'clock the theatres are emptied, and the upper classes flock to the Piazza. I have never been there later than half-past twelve, but the riotous fun still continued at that hour; and, for a week afterwards, the squeak of whistles may be heard at intervals in the streets.

At the two periods of Christmas and Easter, the young Roman girls take their first communion. The former, however, is generally preferred, as it is a season of rejoicing in the Church, and the ceremonies are not so sad as at Easter. In entering upon this religious phase of their life, it is their custom to retire to a convent, and pass a week in prayer and reciting the offices of the Church. During this period, no friend, not even their parents, are allowed to visit them, and information as to their health and condition is very reluctantly and sparingly given at the door. In case of illness, the physician of the convent is called; and even then neither parent is allowed to see them, except, perhaps, in very severe cases. Of course, during their stay in the convent, every exertion is made by the sisters to render a monastic life agreeable, and to stimulate the religious sensibilities of the young communicant. The pleasures of society and the world are decried, and the charms of peace, devotion, and spiritual exercises eulogized, until the excited imagination of the communicant leaves her no rest, before she has returned to the convent and taken the veil as a nun. The happiness of families is thus sometimes destroyed; and I knew one very united and pleasant Roman family which in this way was sadly broken up. Two of three sisters were so worked upon at their first communion, that the prayers of family and friends proved unavailing to retain them in their home. The more they were urged to remain, the more they desired to go, and the parents, brothers, and remaining sister were forced to yield a most reluctant consent. They retired into the convent and became nuns. It was almost as if they had died. From that time forward, the home was no longer a home. I saw them when they took the veil, and a sadder spectacle was not easily to be seen. The girls were happy, but the parents and family wretched, and the parting was very tearful and sad. They do not seem since to have regretted the step they then took; but regret would be unavailing—and even if they felt it, they could scarcely show it. The occupation of the sisters in the monastery they have joined is prayers, the offices of the Church, and, I believe, a little instruction of poor children. But gossip among themselves, of the pettiest kind, must make up for the want of wider worldly interests. In such limited relations, little jealousies engender great hypocrisies; a restricted horizon enlarges small objects. The repressed heart and introverted mind, deprived of their natural scope, consume themselves in self-consciousness, and duties easily degenerate into routine. We are not all in all to ourselves; the world has claims upon us, which it is cowardice to shrink from, and folly to deny. Self-forgetfulness is a great virtue, and selfishness a great vice. After all, the best religious service is worthy occupation. Large interests keep the heart sound; and the best of prayers is the doing of a good act with a pure purpose.

"He prayeth best who loveth bestAll things, both great and small;For the dear God who loveth us,He made and loveth all."

ABDEL-HASSAN

The compensations of calamity are made apparent after long intervals oftime.The sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all fact.—EMERSON.Abdel-Hassan o'er the Desert journeyed with his caravan,—Many a richly laden camel, many a faithful serving-man.And before the haughty master bowed alike the man and beast;For the power of Abdel-Hassan was the wonder of the East.It was now the twelfth day's journey, but its closing did not bringAbdel-Hassan and his servants to the long-expected spring.From the ancient line of travel they had wandered far away,And at evening, faint and weary, on a waste of Desert lay.Fainting men and famished camels stretched them round the master's tent;For the water-skins were empty, and the dates were nearly spent.All the night, as Abdel-Hassan on the Desert lay apart,Nothing broke the lifeless silence but the throbbing of his heart;All the night he heard it beating, while his sleepless, anxious eyesWatched the shining constellations wheeling onward through the skies.When the glowing orbs, receding, paled before the coming day,Abdel-Hassan called his servants and devoutly knelt to pray.Then his words were few and solemn to the leader of his train:—"Thirty men and eighty camels, Haroun, in thy care remain."Keep the beasts and guard the treasure till the needed aid I bring.God is great! His name is mighty!—I, alone, will seek the spring."Mounted on his strongest camel, Abdel-Hassan rode away,While his faithful followers watched him passing, in the blaze of day,Like a speck upon the Desert, like a moving human hand,Where the fiery skies were sweeping down to meet the burning sand.Passed he then their far horizon, and beyond it rode alone;—They alone, with Arab patience, lay within its flaming zone.Day by day the servants waited, but the master never came,—Day by day, in feebler accents, called on Allah's holy name.One by one they killed the camels, loathing still the proffered food,But in weakness or in frenzy slaked their burning thirst in blood.On unheeded heaps of treasure rested each unconscious head;While, with pious care, the dying struggled to entomb the dead.So they perished. Gaunt with famine, still did Haroun's trusty handFor his latest dead companion scoop sepulture in the sand.Then he died; and pious Nature, where he lay so gaunt and grim,Moved by her divine compassion, did the same kind thing for him.Earth upon her burning bosom held him in his final rest,While the hot winds of the Desert piled the sand above his breast.—Onward in his fiery travel Abdel-Hassan held his way,Yielding to the camel's instinct, halting not, by night or day,'Till the faithful beast, exhausted in her fearful journey, fell,With her eye upon the palm-trees rising o'er the lonely well:With a faint, convulsive struggle, and a feeble moan, she died,While her still surviving master lay unconscious by her side.So he lay until the evening, when a passing caravanFrom the dead incumbering camel brought to life the dying man.Slowly murmured Abdel-Hassan, as they bathed his fainting head,"All is lost, for all have perished!—they are numbered with the dead!"I, who had such power and treasure but a single moon ago,Now my life and poor subsistence to a stranger's bounty owe."God is great! His name is mighty! He is victor in the strife!Stripped of pride and power and substance, He hath left me faithand life."—Sixty years had Abdel-Hassan, since the stranger's friendly handSaved him from the burning Desert, lived and prospered in the land;And his life of peaceful labor, in its pure and simple ways,For his loss fourfold returned him, and a mighty length of days.Sixty years of faith and patience gave him wisdom's mural crown;Sons and daughters brought him honor with his riches and renown.Men beheld his reverend aspect, and revered his blameless name;And in peace he dwelt with strangers, in the fulness of his fame.But the heart of Abdel-Hassan yearned, as yearns the heart of man,Still to die among his kindred, ending life where it began.So he summoned all his household, and he gave the brief command,—"Go and gather all our substance;—we depart from out the land."Then they journeyed to the Desert with a great and numerous train,To his old nomadic instinct trusting life and wealth again.It was now the sixth day's journey, when they met the moving sand,On the great wind of the Desert, driving o'er that arid land;And the air was red and fervid with the Simoom's fiery breath;—None could see his nearest fellow in the stifling blast of death.Blinded men from prostrate camels piled the stores to windward round,And within the barrier herded, on the hot, unstable ground.Two whole days the great wind lasted, when the living of the trainFrom the hot drifts dug the camels and resumed their way again.But the lines of care grew deeper on the master's swarthy cheek,While around the weakest fainted and the strongest waxéd weak;And the water-skins were empty, and a silent murmur ranFrom the faint, bewildered servants through the straggling caravan:—"Let the land we left be blessed!—that to which we go, accurst!—From our pleasant wells of water came we here to die of thirst?"But the master stilled the murmur with his steadfast, quiet eye:—"God is great," he said, devoutly,—"when He wills it, we shall die."As he spake, he swept the Desert with his vision clear and calm,And along the far horizon saw the green crest of the palm.Man and beast, with weak steps quickened, hasted to the lonely well,And around it, faint and panting, in a grateful tumult fell.Many days they stayed and rested, and amidst his fervent prayerAbdel-Hassan pondered deeply that strange bond which held him there.Then there came an aged stranger, journeying with his caravan;And when each had each saluted, Abdel-Hassan thus began:—"Knowest thou this well of water? lies it on the travelled ways?"And he answered,—"From the highway thou art distant many days."Where thou seest this well of water, where these thorns andpalm-trees stand,Once the Desert swept unbroken in a waste of burning sand;"There was neither life nor herbage, not a drop of water lay,All along the arid valley where thou seest this well to-day."Sixty years have wrought their changes since a man of wealthand pride,With his servants and his camels, here, amidst his riches, died."As we journeyed o'er the Desert, dead beneath the blazing sky,Here I saw them, beasts and masters, in a common burial lie;"Thirty men and eighty camels did the shrouding sand infold;And we gathered up their treasure, spices, precious stones, and gold;"Then we heaped the sand above them, and, beneath the burning sun,With a friendly care we finished what the winds had well begun."Still I hold that master's treasure, and his record, and his name;Long I waited for his kindred, but no kindred ever came."Time, who beareth all things onward, hither bore our steps again,When around this spot were scattered whitened bones of beasts and men;"And from out the heaving hillocks of the mingled sand and mouldLo! the little palms were springing, which to-day are great and old."From the shrubs we held the camels; for I felt that life of man,Breaking to new forms of being, through that tender herbage ran."In the graves of men and camels long the dates unheeded lay,Till their germs of life commanded larger life from that decay;"And the falling dews, arrested, nourished every tender shoot,While beneath, the hidden moisture gathered to each wandering root."So they grew; and I have watched them, as we journeyed, year by year;And we digged this well beneath them, where thou seest it, fresh andclear."Thus from waste and loss and sorrow still are joy and beauty born,Like the fruitage of these palm-trees and the blossom of the thorn;"Life from death, and good from evil!—from that buried caravanSprings the life to save the living, many a weak, despairing man."As he ended, Abdel-Hassan, quivering through his aged frame,Asked, in accents slow and broken, "Knowest thou that master's name?""He was known as Abdel-Hassan, famed for wealth and power and pride;But the proud have often fallen, and, as he, the great have died!"Then, upon the ground before them, prostrate Abdel-Hassan fell,With his aged hands extended, trembling, to the lonely well,—And the sacred soil beneath him cast upon his hoary head,—Named the servants and the camels,—summoned Haroun from the dead,—Clutched the unconscious palms around him, as if they were living men,—And before him, in their order, rose his buried train again.Moved by pity, spake the stranger, bending o'er him in his grief:—"What affects the man of sorrow? Speak,—for speaking is relief."Then he answered, rising slowly to that aged stranger's knee,—"Thou beholdest Abdel-Hassan! They were mine, and I am he!"Wondering, stood they all around him, and a reverent silence kept,While, amidst them, Abdel-Hassan lifted up his voice and wept.Joy and grief, and faith and triumph, mingled in his flowing tears;Refluent on his patient spirit rolled the tide of sixty years.As the past and present blended, lo! his larger vision saw,In his own life's compensation, Nature's universal law."God is good, O reverend stranger! He hath taught me of His ways,By this great and crowning lesson, in the evening of my days."Keep the treasure,—I have plenty,—and am richer that I seeLife ascend, through change and evil, to that perfect life to be,—"In each woe a blessing folded, from all loss a greater gain,Joy and hope from fear and sorrow, rest and peace from toil and pain."God is great! His name is mighty! He is victor in the strife!For He bringeth Good from Evil, and from Death commandeth Life!"

ABOUT SPIRES

When the children of Shem said one to another at Babel,—"Go to, let us build us a city and a tower whose top shall reach unto heaven," they typified a remarkable trait of the human mind,—a desire for a tangible and material exponent of itself in its most heroic moods. In the earlier ages of the world, when humanity, as it were, was becoming conscious of itself and its godlike energies, it seems as if this desire could find no nobler expression than in towers. The same spirit of enterprise which in our own day stretches forth inquiring hands into unexplored realms of physical and intellectual being, and acknowledges in the spoils of such search its noblest and proudest attainments, in more primeval times appears to have been content with the actual and visible invasion of high building into that sky which to them was the great type of the unknown and mysterious.

The birth of these structures was not of the practical necessities of life, but of that fond desire of the soul which has ever haunted mankind with intimations of immortality. Towers thus became the boldest imaginable symbols of energy and power. And when, in the course of time, they became exigencies of society, and familiarized by the idea of usefulness, even then they could not but be recognized as expressions of the more heroic elements of human nature.

Founded in superabundant massiveness, and built in prodigality of strength, the tower seems to defy the elements and to outlive tradition. Old age restores it to more than its primeval significance; and when humbler erections have passed away and crumbled in ruins, it appears once more to rise above the customary uses of men, and to become a companion for tempests and clouds. Dismantled, deserted, and bearing,

"Inscribed upon its visionary sides,This history of many a winter's storm,And obscure record of the path of fire,"

Nature lays claim to it, and with moss and ivy and eld, with weeds and flowers, she takes it to her bosom.

"Dying insensibly awayFrom human thoughts and purposes,"

we at length associate it with no achievements of man, and its masonry becomes venerable to us, as shaped by mysterious beings,—Ghouls or Titans,—no fellow-workers of ours.

Let us for a while forget the tedious realisms around us, and eat of the dreamy Lotos. Let us look eastward over the wide waters, and behold, along the horizon, the "dim rich cities" printing themselves against the morning. Let us listen to their mellow chimes that come faintly to us, and bless those deep-toned utterances so full of the tenderness of ancient days and the melody of gray traditions. Let us bless them; for, like lyres of Amphion, at their sound arose the bell-bearing tower, which made cities beautiful and their people happy. O St. Chrysostom! there were other golden mouths than thine that preached by the Bosphorus, and their pulpits were the airy chambers of the first Christian towers. Where the muezzin every hour from the lofty minaret now calls the faithful Mahometan to prayer, were first heard those matin and vesper chimes which since then throughout Catholic Europe have accompanied the rising and the setting of the sun. Thus the Christian tower immediately becomes associated with the tenderest and most poetical ideas of monastic and pastoral religion. It seemed emulous from the beginning to be the first to catch the beams of morning, and, like the statue of Memnon, to respond to the golden touch by sounds of music. Then the fervid heart of Italy took fire, and from her bosom uprose over all her cities the beautiful campanile. Still and solemn it stood on the plains of Lombardy, like a sentinel on the outskirts of our faith, whispering to the vast of space that all was well. Over the lagunes of Venice the weary toil of two centuries piled up the tower of St. Mark. Ravenna, with barbaric pride, built her round-cinctured towers to the glory of the Exarchate. Rome followed with her square campaniles, whose arcaded chambers looked down on a hundred cloisters. Then there were La Ghirlandina at Modena, Il Torazzo at Cremona, Torre della Mangia at Siena, the Garisenda at Bologna, the Leaning Tower at Pisa. Everywhere they sought the skies with emulous heights, and ere long they arose in such number as to give a distinctive aspect to the Christian city, and to warn the traveller from afar that he approached walls within which religion was a pride and a power. Who has not admired the Giotto Campanile, called "the Beautiful," at Florence? And who has not wondered at the splendor of her citizens, whose command was, "to construct an edifice whose magnificence should be beyond the conception even of the cognoscenti, and whose height and quality of workmanship should surpass all that has been built in any style, in Greece or Rome, even at the most florid period of their power!"

But the spiritualization and glory of the tower are yet wanting. There is a very human expression about it, as it stands in the midst of those glimmering lands, with its haughty summit commanding far-distant plains,—

"Far as the wild swan wings, to where the skyDips down to sea and sands,"—

a very human expression of scornful pride and imperious dominion. We shall see how it outgrew its mere humanities and became an expression of immortal aspirations, a symbol of our relationship with ethereal existences.

These Italian campaniles had either flat summits, or were crowned with a low, unimportant roof. But as they approached the North of Lombardy, and found their way into Germany, France, and Britain, these roofs, through the necessities of climate, became steeper and sharper. Many of the little gray mountain-chapels in the South of Switzerland still lift up these pointed towers amid the hamlets of the valley, having gathered in the hardy flocks at eventide for seven or eight centuries. The same early modifications may yet be seen on the banks of the Rhine, where the conical, stork-haunted caps of the round towers are so picturesquely associated with that legendary scenery. Those dear, time-worn, rugged, red-tiled roofs, with their peaks coming in just where they are needed,—what could the artist do without them? Then the same necessities made the early French and Norman builders push up into the air those gaunt, quaint old camelbacks, with spindles or pinnacles astride. You cannot but love them for their strangeness and the surprise they make against the quiet sky. In Britain, too, you might have beheld this tendency, where the lordly curfew quenched the lights in castle and cot from beneath a very extinguisher of a roof. Now, as, in the natural growth of the human mind, the heart became more and more impregnated with the beauty of holiness, and the prayers of men ascended with somewhat of purer aspiration to heaven, so did they build their tower-roofs higher and higher into the air, till at length the spire was born. In one of those quaint antique towers of Normandy, Coutances, it was first fully developed; and it is curious to see how in this instance its roof-origin was still remembered: for it has tall, gabled garret-windows rising from its base, connected by rude cross-bars to the slope of the spire; and it has a kind of scaly mail, Ruskin says, which is nothing more than the copying in stone of the common wooden shingles of the house-roof. Now the proud Italian architects, disdainful though they were of the arts of the rude Northern builders, could not but admit the expressiveness of the pointed roof; so they placed a form of it on some of their campaniles, as on those of Venice and Cremona, in both these instances making it a third of the whole height. But the spire, though an effective, was as yet an unambitious structure,—scarcely more than an exaltation or an apotheosis of the roof. For a long time it continued to be merely a supplementary addition in wood to the solid masonry of the tower, and in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries was often added to substructures of the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth.

Surely it is very dull in us, out of our present enlightenment, to continue to distinguish the mediaeval times as the Dark Ages, as if they were glimmering and ghostly, and men groped about in them blindly, living in a sort of dusky romance of feudality. Did you ever study De la Roche's incarnation of Mediaeval Art in his Hemicycle,—that long saintly robe with its still and serious folds, that fair dreamy face, those upturned eyes, "the homes of silent prayer," the contemplative repose? It is truly an exquisite idealization; yet there is something wanting. I believe the piety of those days was rather a passion than a sentiment. Their "beauty of holiness" was rather an active emotional impulse than a passive spiritualization, and was incomplete without a material expression, a tangible demonstration of itself. Like the fabled Narcissus, it yearned for its own image. Hence the joy and luxury of the ecclesiastical buildings of that period. They were the very blossoming of the tree of knowledge. This was, indeed, an unenlightened, perhaps a superstitious principle of worship; but it was enthusiastic, self-sacrificing, and chivalrous. It, indeed, sent the stylite to his pillar, the hermit to the wilderness, the ascetic to the scourge and hair-cloth shirt; but it also led the warrior to the Holy Land, the beggar to the castle-hearth, and the workman to the building of the House of God. It is no wonder that a religion born thus in childlike fervor, and seeking expression in outward signs, built upward. It is no wonder that out of the prosaic elements of the roof it made the spiritual essence of the spire. If we look through the whole range of architectural forms in classic or mediaeval times, we shall find no one so indicative of any human emotion as this simple outline is of the highest of all emotions,—prayer. It is a significant fact, that the sentiment of aspiration is nowhere hinted at in Classic Art, and we look in vain for it in all pagan architectures. This is not surprising. The worshippers who built in those schools demonstrated there all the noblest ideas they were capable of,—intellectual beauty, dignity, power, truth, chastity, courage, and all the other virtues cherished in their theologies; but their personal relations with any higher sphere of existence, vague and undefined as they were, called for no expression in their temples, and obtained none.