All you that have had your souls touched at the innermost, and have
attempted to release yourselves in verse and have written trash - (and
who know it) - be comforted. You shall have satisfaction at last, and
you shall attain fame in some other fashion - perhaps in private
theatricals or perhaps in journalism. You will be granted a prevision
of complete success, and your hearts shall be filled - but you must not
expect to find this mood on the Emilian Way when it is raining.
All you that feel youth slipping past you and that are desolate at the
approach of age, be merry; it is not what it looks like from in front
and from outside. There is a glory in all completion, and all good
endings are but shining transitions. There will come a sharp moment of
revelation when you shall bless the effect of time. But this divine
moment - - it is not on the Emilian Way in the rain that you should
seek it.
All you that have loved passionately and have torn your hearts asunder
in disillusions, do not imagine that things broken cannot be mended by
the good angels. There is a kind of splice called 'the long splice'
which makes a cut rope seem what it was before; it is even stronger
than before, and can pass through a block. There will descend upon you
a blessed hour when you will be convinced as by a miracle, and you
will suddenly understand the _redintegratio amoris (amoris
redintegratio,_ a Latin phrase). But this hour you will not receive in
the rain on the Emilian Way.
Here then, next day, just outside a town called Borgo, past the middle
of morning, the rain ceased.
Its effect was still upon the slippery and shining road, the sky was
still fast and leaden, when, in a distaste for their towns, I skirted
the place by a lane that runs westward of the houses, and sitting upon
a low wall, I looked up at the Apennines, which were now plain above
me, and thought over my approaching passage through those hills.
But here I must make clear by a map the mass of mountains which I was
about to attempt, and in which I forded so many rivers, met so many
strange men and beasts, saw such unaccountable sights, was imprisoned,
starved, frozen, haunted, delighted, burnt up, and finally refreshed
in Tuscany - in a word, where I had the most extraordinary and
unheard-of adventures that ever diversified the life of man.
The straight line to Rome runs from Milan not quite through Piacenza,
but within a mile or two of that city. Then it runs across the first
folds of the Apennines, and gradually diverges from the Emilian Way.
It was not possible to follow this part of the line exactly, for there
was no kind of track.
