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She seemed to have forgotten the angry words that had passed between her and Ferris, to remember him only as one who had known her mother, while she went on to relate some little facts in the history of her mother's last days; and she rose into a higher, serener atmosphere, inaccessible to his resentment or his regret, as she spoke of her loss.
It is, in a century-old tradition, the Styx of two unhappy ghosts that await the end of time to pass its confines and enjoy the sunshine of serener worlds. A young woman of a family that had settled near this marsh died of a fever caused by its malarial exhalations, and was buried near the swamp.
This was the beginning of a serener season for the chastened spirit of Baptista Heddegan. She had, in truth, discovered, underneath the crust of uncouthness and meagre articulation which was due to their Troglodytean existence, that her unwelcomed daughters had natures that were unselfish almost to sublimity.
At length, by some supernal fiat banished, The land sank down in one great cataclysm; The vales, the plains, the mountains slowly vanished, Buried and quenched in the wide sea's abysm. Thus Science dreams: but from the dream upflashes On his swift thought the subtly shadowed truth, That all serener joys bloom on the ashes, The lava, and spent craters of lost youth.
But this Dante saw not and knew not, for he stood between the two opposing forces very composedly, with the same quiet smile upon his face, and he held up his hands toward either party as a man might do that wished to sunder and pacify quarrelling children. "Gently, friends, gently," he said; "there is a pleasant way to end this dilemma." Then he turned to me, and I never saw his face serener.
Rise, my dear, to your proper dignity and destiny have a right and natural pride in the rock that bore you! You, a child of the Greater Church of an Authority of which all other authorities are the mere caricature why all this humiliation, these misgivings this turmoil? Take a serener take a loftier view! Ah! if I could evoke Fountain for one hour!"
And this most particularly in those spontaneous arts which, first in the field, without need of adaptations of material or avoidance of the already done, without need of using up the rejected possibilities of previous art, or awakening yet unknown emotions, are the simple, straightforward expression, each the earliest satisfactory one in its own line, of the long unexpressed, long integrated, organic wants and wishes of great races of men: the arts, for instance, which have given us that Hermes, Titian's pictures, and Michael Angelo's and Raphael's frescoes; given us Bach, Gluck, Mozart, the serener parts of Beethoven, music of yet reserved pathos, braced, spring-like strength, learned, select: arts which never go beyond the universal, averaged expression of the soul's desires, because the desires themselves are sifted, limited to the imperishable and unchangeable, like the artistic methods which embody them, reduced to the essential by the long delay of utterance, the long century long efforts to utter.
I confess to you that I do not like the idea of answering before God and the king for all those conversions." At the same time with the controversial treatises, the Elevations sur les Mysteres and the Meditations sur l'Evangile were written at Meaux, drawing the bishop away to the serener regions of supreme faith.
Ugo Foscolo, an excellent critic where his own temper and violence did not interfere, sees nothing but jealousy in Petrarch's dislike of Dante, and nothing but Jesuitism in similar feelings entertained by such men as Tiraboschi. Such men, with all their acuteness, are incapable of seeing what can be effected by nobler and serener times, and the progress of civilisation.
Especially if we sleep in the open, without any tent, with the mountains always before us, with the stars twinkling brightly above us, do we have this sense of having ascended to a loftier and serener world. At the heads of these glaciers there is little else but snow and ice. The moraines have almost disappeared or, rather, have hardly yet come into being.
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