The unfrequency of windows in the body of
the building is partly attributed to the climate; but the total
exclusion of light from some parts, as the base of the central tower,
carries our thoughts back to the ancient system of Italian life, when
every man's home had its dark, secret places, the abodes of his worst
passions; whose shadows were alone intrusted with the motion of his
thoughts; whose walls became the whited sepulchers of crime; whose
echoes were never stirred except by such words as they dared not
repeat;[22] from which the rod of power, or the dagger of passion, came
forth invisible; before whose stillness princes grew pale, as their
fates were prophesied or fulfilled by the horoscope or the hemlock; and
nations, as the whisper of anarchy or of heresy was avenged by the
opening of the low doors, through which those who entered returned not.
[Footnote 22: Shelley has caught the feeling finely:--"The house is
penetrated to its corners by the peeping insolence of the day. When the
time comes the crickets shall not see me."--_Cenci_ [Act II. scene I,
quoted from memory.]]
146. The mind of the Italian, sweet and smiling in its operations, deep
and silent in its emotions, was thus, in some degree, typified by those
abodes into which he was wont to retire from the tumult and wrath of
life, to cherish or to gratify the passions which its struggles had
excited; abodes which now gleam brightly and purely among the azure
mountains, and by the sapphire sea, but whose stones are dropped with
blood; whose vaults are black with the memory of guilt and grief
unpunished and unavenged, and by whose walls the traveler hastens
fearfully, when the sun has set, lest he should hear, awakening again
through the horror of their chambers, the faint wail of the children of
Ugolino,[23] the ominous alarm of Bonatti, or the long low cry of her
who perished at Coll' Alto.
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