We spent, and the whole joy of earth,
That never more will gladden us
While sun and stars gleam overhead.
What was it opened then our hearts?
What was it forged the golden chain?
It was—thou know’st it well, comrade—
The sailing on that magic night.”
“Yes, dear reader, whenever I let these verses and their splendid truth vibrate again in my soul—and how often and how gladly I do it!—I have to say, Such days thou shalt never know again—such happy entrance into another’s heart. And what a heart it was that bared itself to me with all it hid and would soon reveal! We were in a café at Naples, a copy of the Allgemeine Zeitung lying between him and me. It was in the best part of the spring of 1859. We both reached for it, and told our names, and the friendship was begun. ‘You must excuse me,’ Haeckel said, ‘I have to go to Ischia to-night by the market-boat.’ ‘To Ischia? That’s good: I am going there myself. ‘I am very glad, because I heard I was to be alone. It starts at nine o’clock.’ That was all that had passed between us before the crossing. What I have described in the above verses only began when we, the only Germans on board, made ourselves comfortable on the open deck. Before the journey was over we were intimate friends, and have remained friends in joy and sorrow to this moment, though the mental differences between us are enormous. However, Casamicciola brought us together in a wonderful way. We had common quarters, and always went out together for walks or botanising; we were never separated when we painted or drew, as Haeckel did with real passion. On the third morning, when we found some rare thermal plants in an almost broiling meadow and discovered nearly at the same spot the ruins of an ancient Roman bath, the remarkable coincidence affected us so much that we embraced each other joyously and dedicated the rest of our flask to them. We both felt that we could not do otherwise. So we pleasantly enjoyed the magnificent scene that lay at our feet from the height of Epomeo. We stripped off nearly the whole of our clothes, and dipped, in almost primitive nakedness, in the warm muddy streams that shot up out of the dark depths under a growth of tendrils and ferns. We shouted out, ‘How fine it is in these warm and beautifully shaded brooks! How delightful it must be in the ravines of Atlas! We must go there.’ We spent more than a whole day in the most marvellous ravines of Atlas, though neither of us had the least idea of them. But we determined to make the journey there, and sketched it out in detail, to be undertaken as soon as we left Italy. He contracted a perfect fever for travelling. We were four weeks in Pagano’s excellent inn at Capri with a few artists, and he completely lost himself with delight. He became intimate with the young artists; being hitherto surrounded by men of scientific interests, he had avoided them. The intermediary between Haeckel and them was myself. I liked no one better than genial artists. Now Haeckel was seized with a passion for painting landscapes day after day. He was especially interested in the most fantastically shaped rocks. On the other hand, he neglected his marine animals, and did not return to them entirely until he got to Messina, where he devoted himself to the radiolaria, which were destined to play so important a part in his work. Darwin, who was soon to dominate his whole thought, had little significance for him at that time, as the struggle for life had not yet been discovered. We rarely spoke of it, but talked constantly of Johannes Müller. He was Haeckel’s ideal, as long as I kept in touch with him. He also spoke often and generously of his university friends, Dr. W. D. Focke, who was his special botanical comrade, Dr. Dreyer and Dr. Strube, who were his chief friends at the university at Würtzburg. The ordinary life and pleasures of the student, and their heavy beer-drinking, were a torture to him; he avoided them as much as possible. Very often I could not understand how it was that I brought him to the highest pitch of gaiety, whereas on all his earlier travels, especially when botany was still his favourite science, he would, after the common meal, withdraw quietly with his books and plants to the solitude of his own room. Yet he could be the gayest of all. In fact, his hearty and wonderful laugh, in all notes up to the very highest, rings over and over again in the memory of any man who has once heard it; it is the frank laughter of a glad human heart. And whoever has seen the deep earnestness with which the great scientist threw himself into the study of the most arduous problems would be astounded to hear it.”
The Strait of Messina is the pearl of Italy. In my opinion it is finer than Naples. The huge volcano and the deep blue strip of water, that seems to be confined between the white coasts like some fabulous giant-stream, give a feeling of sublimity beside which the Bay of Naples seems but an idyll in the memory. The colours are more vivid; you think you would catch hold of the blue bodily if you put your hand in the water. It is a land of ancient myths. The Cyclops hammer their work in Etna. Scylla and Charybdis lurk in the Strait. Once, in the days of Homer, when the sun of civilisation still lay on a corner of Asia, a dim Münchhausen-world was lived here, such as we find to-day in the heart of Africa or New Guinea. But times changed. Zoologists came and fished with Müller-nets for tiny transparent sea-creatures in the gentle periodic currents, that may once have given rise to the legend of Scylla and Charybdis. There is no place more favourable for the purpose than the harbour of Messina. The basin is open only at one spot, towards the north. The westerly wind is cut off from the town by the mountains, and can do no harm. Even the detested southern wind, the sirocco, that lashes the Strait till it is white with foam, cannot enter. There is only the north wind that drives the water into the basin. The waves it brings in are full of millions of sea-animals, which accumulate in the cul-de-sac of the harbour. In fact, if the sirocco has previously been blowing in the Strait and gathered great swarms of animals from the southern parts at the mouth of the harbour, and then the north wind drives them all inside, the whole of the water seems to be alive with them. If you dip a glass in it, you do not get water, but a sort of “animal stew,” the living things making up more of the bulk than the fluid—little crystalline creatures, medusæ, salpæ, crustacea, vermalia, and others of many kinds.