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To the well-known passage in Childe Harold on Soracte and the "Latian echoes" he appends a prose comment, which preserves its interest as hearing on recent educational controversies: "I wish to express that we become tired of the task before we can comprehend the beauty; that we learn by rote, before we get by heart; that the freshness is worn away, and the future pleasure and advantage deadened and destroyed, at an age when we can neither feel nor understand the power of composition, which it requires an acquaintance with life, as well as Latin and Greek, to relish or to reason upon.... In some parts of the continent young persons are taught from common authors, and do not read the best classics till their maturity."
It seems to prove that his business had not always been that of a mere harlequin or merry-andrew whose only care was that the revelry should run high and the fun grow fast and furious, while the fire blazed and crackled on the hearth, while the streets swarmed with festive crowds, and through the clear frosty air, far away to the north, Soracte showed his coronal of snow.
Pointing northwards to a ridged hill on the horizon, he asked in another voice if she knew its name. "You mean Mount Soracte?" "Yes. You don't know Latin, or it would make you quote Horace." She shook her head, looked down, and spoke more humbly than he had ever yet heard her. "But I know it in an English translation." "Well, that's more than most women do." He said it in a grudging way.
Soracte rose before us, bulging up quite abruptly out of the plain, and keeping itself entirely distinct from a whole horizon of hills. Byron well compares it to a wave just on the bend, and about to break over towards the spectator.
Why is he concealed, as they say the son of the sea-goddess Thetis was, just before the mournful funerals of Troy; lest a manly habit should hurry him to slaughter, and the Lycian troops? You see how Soracte stands white with deep snow, nor can the laboring woods any longer support the weight, and the rivers stagnate with the sharpness of the frost.
Still, even at her wish, I cannot raise Soracte or Vesuvius on my shoulders, or place Thrasymene Lake on the palm of my hand, or from black make my eyes blue, like those of the Lygians. If she so desired, I could have the wish, but the change does not lie in my power. I am not a philosopher, but also I am not so dull as I have seemed, perhaps, more than once to thee.
Soracte kept us company, sometimes a little on one side, sometimes behind, looming up again and again, when we thought that we had done with it, and so becoming rather tedious at last, like a person who presents himself for another and another leave-taking after the one which ought to have been final. Honeysuckles sweetened the hedges along the road.
Thomson has heard of a similar ceremony in the Cook group of islands. As in ancient Italy, so in Fiji, a certain clan have the privilege of fire-walking. It is far enough from Fiji to Southern India, as it is far enough from Mount Soracte to Fiji. But in Southern India the Klings practise the rite of the Hirpi and the Na Ivilankata.
One of the choicest Greek wines in the host's famous cellar had been brought in for the friends. There was enough snow on Soracte, Maecenas had said laughingly, to justify the oldest Chian, if Horace could forego his Italian numbers and his home-brewed Sabine for one night.
"I do think much of love," said she, thoughtfully, still looking down at her breast. "And of me," he insisted. "Nay, not of you," she answered, without delay. "I shall know," said he, wistfully, "for I shall consult the fates. I have here a sacred coin. An old dame found it when she was digging in the side of Soracte.
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