I could never approach him
with the confiding affection of a child.
My father's feelings were wrapped up in my elder brother. He was to be
the inheritor of the family title and the family dignity, and every
thing was sacrificed to him - I, as well as every thing else. It was
determined to devote me to the church, that so my humors and myself
might be removed out of the way, either of tasking my father's time and
trouble, or interfering with the interests of my brother. At an early
age, therefore, before my mind had dawned upon the world and its
delights, or known any thing of it beyond the precincts of my father's
palace, I was sent to a convent, the superior of which was my uncle,
and was confided entirely to his care.
My uncle was a man totally estranged from the world; he had never
relished, for he had never tasted its pleasures; and he deemed rigid
self-denial as the great basis of Christian virtue. He considered every
one's temperament like his own; or at least he made them conform to it.
His character and habits had an influence over the fraternity of which
he was superior. A more gloomy, saturnine set of beings were never
assembled together. The convent, too, was calculated to awaken sad and
solitary thoughts. It was situated in a gloomy gorge of those mountains
away south of Vesuvius. All distant views were shut out by sterile
volcanic heights. A mountain stream raved beneath its walls, and eagles
screamed about its turrets.
I had been sent to this place at so tender an age as soon to lose all
Distinct recollection of the scenes I had left behind. As my mind
expanded, therefore, it formed its idea of the world from the convent
and its vicinity, and a dreary world it appeared to me. An early tinge
of melancholy was thus infused into my character; and the dismal
stories of the monks, about devils and evil spirits, with which they
affrighted my young imagination, gave me a tendency to superstition,
which I could never effectually shake off. They took the same delight
to work upon my ardent feelings that had been so mischievously
exercised by my father's household.
I can recollect the horrors with which they fed my heated fancy during
an eruption of Vesuvius. We were distant from that volcano, with
mountains between us; but its convulsive throes shook the solid
foundations of nature. Earthquakes threatened to topple down our
convent towers. A lurid, baleful light hung in the heavens at night,
and showers of ashes, borne by the wind, fell in our narrow valley. The
monks talked of the earth being honey-combed beneath us; of Streams of
molten lava raging through its veins; of caverns of sulphurous flames
roaring in the centre, the abodes of demons and the damned; of fiery
gulfs ready to yawn beneath our feet. All these tales were told to the
doleful accompaniment of the mountain's thunders, whose low bellowing
made the walls of our convent vibrate.
One of the monks had been a painter, but had retired from the world,
and embraced this dismal life in expiation of some crime. He was a
melancholy man, who pursued his art in the solitude of his cell, but
made it a source of penance to him. His employment was to portray,
either on canvas or in waxen models, the human face and human form, in
the agonies of death and in all the stages of dissolution and decay.
The fearful mysteries of the charnel house were unfolded in his
labors - the loathsome banquet of the beetle and the worm. - I turn with
shuddering even from the recollection of his works. Yet, at that time,
my strong, but ill-directed imagination seized with ardor upon his
instructions in his art. Any thing was a variety from the dry studies
and monotonous duties of the cloister. In a little while I became
expert with my pencil, and my gloomy productions were thought worthy of
decorating some of the altars of the chapel.
In this dismal way was a creature of feeling and fancy brought up.
Every thing genial and amiable in my nature was repressed and nothing
brought out but what was unprofitable and ungracious. I was ardent in
my temperament; quick, mercurial, impetuous, formed to be a creature
all love and adoration; but a leaden hand was laid on all my finer
qualities. I was taught nothing but fear and hatred. I hated my uncle,
I hated the monks, I hated the convent in which I was immured. I hated
the world, and I almost hated myself, for being, as I supposed, so
hating and hateful an animal.
When I had nearly attained the age of sixteen, I was suffered, on one
occasion, to accompany one of the brethren on a mission to a distant
part of the country. We soon left behind us the gloomy valley in which
I had been pent up for so many years, and after a short journey among
the mountains, emerged upon the voluptuous landscape that spreads
itself about the Bay of Naples. Heavens! How transported was I, when I
stretched my gaze over a vast reach of delicious sunny country, gay
with groves and vineyards; with Vesuvius rearing its forked summit to
my right; the blue Mediterranean to my left, with its enchanting coast,
studded with shining towns and sumptuous villas; and Naples, my native
Naples, gleaming far, far in the distance.
Good God! was this the lovely world from which I had been excluded! I
Had reached that age when the sensibilities are in all their bloom and
freshness. Mine had been checked and chilled. They now burst forth with
the suddenness of a retarded spring.
