It is nice to have the children about the Villino; and that they are exiles adds pathos to the sound of their happy laughter in our ears, and a tenderness to the pleasure with which our eyes watch their unconscious gaiety.
Perhaps, however, if anyone wanted to have a really poetic impression of our little house, they should see it by moonlight, or--which, of course, nobody does except by accident--in the summer dawn. Whether it is because of an unconscious appreciation of the limits of our own intellect, or whether from some inherent vulgarity, human nature is prone to depreciate all that is laid out very plainly before it. We demand mystery in everything if it is to mean beauty to us.
Some such idea as this Mr. Bernard Shaw expresses--in one of his uncanny leaps of the spirit out of his own destructive philosophy--when he makes the Christian martyr retort to the Pagan who accuses her of not understanding her God: “He wouldn’t be my God if I could!”
To pass from the infinite to the atom: when the Villino garden and its prospects are but imperfectly revealed on a moonlight night the view, with mystery added to its fairness, becomes wonderful in its loveliness.
On such a night as this the valley holds mist in its bosom, and the distant moor ridges in their pine-woods might be the Alps, for the air of distance they assume, the remote dignity with which they withdraw themselves, pale and ethereal, into the serene sky. It may be the moon is rising over the great wooded hill in front of the Villino. The white radiance pours full upon us. We know all that is revealed, and yet all is different. Each familiar object has a strange and transfigured face. The little cypress-trees, rimmed in silver, cast black shadows on the grass, silver-cobwebbed. The great moors are exquisite ghost wildernesses, their hollows full of cloudy secrets. And you can hear the night-jar spinning out its monotonous, mysterious song, a song which does not break the grand restfulness, but only accompanies it. We have no running streams--there is nothing perfect here below, it is a great want! But the song of the night-jar makes up a little for the voice of water in the night-time. It is the hearing of some such sound, lost in the turmoil of day, that emphasizes the incomparable silence.