n.

BOOK II

CHAPTER I

Convalescence is a purification, a new birth. Never is life so sweet as
after the pangs of physical suffering, and never is the human soul so
inclined towards purity and faith as after having had a glimpse into the
abyss of death.

After his terrible wound, after a long, slow, agonising struggle, Andrea
Sperelli came back to life renewed in body and spirit--like another man,
like a creature risen out of the icy waters of death, with a mind swept
bare of all that has gone before. The past had receded into the dim
perspective, the troubled waters had calmed, the mud sunk to the bottom;
his soul was cleansed. He returned to the bosom of Mother Nature, and he
felt her re-inforce him maternally with goodness and with strength.

The guest of his cousin at her villa of Schifanoja, Andrea returned to
life again in sight of the sea. The convalescent drew his breath in
harmony with the deep, calm breath of the ocean; his mind was
tranquillised by the serenity of the horizon. Little by little, in these
hours of enforced idleness and retirement, his spirit expanded, bloomed
out, erected itself slowly, like the grass trodden under foot on the
pathway, and he returned to truth and simple faith, became natural and
free of heart, open to the knowledge and disposed to the contemplation
of pure things.

August was drawing to a close. An ecstatic serenity reigned over the
sea; the waters were so transparent that they repeated every image with
absolute fidelity, and their ultimate line melted so imperceptibly into
the sky that the two elements seemed as one, impalpable and
supernatural. The wide amphitheatre of hills, clothed with olives,
oranges and pines and all the noblest forms of Italian vegetation,
embraced the silent sea, and seemed not a multiplicity of things, but a
single vast object under the all-pervading sunshine.

Lying on the grass, or sitting on a rock or under a tree, the young man
felt the river of life flow within him; as in a trance, he seemed to
feel the whole universe throb and palpitate in his breast; in a species
of religious rapture, he felt that he possessed the infinite. That which
he experienced was ineffable, divine. The vista before him opened out by
degrees into a profound and long continued vision, the branches of the
trees overhead supported the firmament, filling the blue, and shining
like the garlands of immortal poets. And he gazed and listened and
breathed