In describing it, Durante says that the ground everywhere smelt sweetly,
and that a gentle, even-tempered wind, which never blew faster or
slower, breathed in his face as he went, making all the leaves point one
way, not so as to disturb the birds in the tops of the trees, but, on
the contrary, sounding a bass to their song. He describes also a little
river which was so full that its little waves, as it hurried along, bent
the grass, full of red and yellow flowers, through which it flowed. He
says that the purest stream in the world beside this one would look as
if it were mixed with something that did not belong to it, even although
it was flowing ever in the brown shadow of the trees, and neither sun
nor moon could shine upon it. He seems to imply that it is always the
month of May in that country. It would be out of place to describe here
the wonderful sights he saw, for the music of them is in another key
from that of this story, and I shall therefore only add from the account
of this traveller, that the people there are so free and so just and so
healthy, that every one of them has a crown like a king and a mitre like
a priest.
The peasant girl--Kilmeny was her name--could not report such grand
things as Durante, for, as the shepherd says, telling her story as I
tell Diamond's--
“Kilmeny had been she knew not where,
And Kilmeny had seen what she could not declare;
Kilmeny had been where the cock never crew,
Where the rain never fell, and the wind never blew.
But it seemed as the harp of the sky had rung,
And the airs of heaven played round her tongue,
When she spoke of the lovely forms she had seen,
And a land where sin had never been;
A land of love and a land of light,
Withouten sun, or moon, or night;
Where the river swayed a living stream,
And the light a pure and cloudless beam:
The land of vision it would seem,
And still an everlasting dream.”
The last two lines are the shepherd's own remark, and a matter of
opinion. But it is clear, I think, that Kilmeny must have described
the same country as Durante saw, though, not having his experience, she
could neither understand nor describe it so well.
Now I must give you such fragments of recollection as Diamond was able
to bring back with him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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