The Spirit Of The Porta San Gallo

“And both the undying fish that swim
Through Bowscale Tarn did wait on him:
The pair were servants of his eye
In their immortality;
They moved about in open sight,
To and fro, for his delight.”

—WORDSWORTH, _Poems of the Imagination_.

The reader should never at once infer that a legend is recent because it is attached to a new place. Spirits and traditions are like the goblin of Norse tale, who moved with the family. The family changed its home to get rid of him, but on the way the elf popped his head out and remarked, “_Wi flütten_” (“We’re flitting” or moving). The ghost of Benjamin Franklin long haunted the library which he had founded in Philadelphia, and when the library or books were transferred to a new building, the ghost went with them and his statue. And in like manner the legend of the religious person, male or female, who is also a _fish_ has travelled over many lands, till it came to the _vasca_ or basin of the Porto San Gallo. Thus Leonard Vair, in his charming _Trois Livres des Charmes_, _Sorcelages ou Enchantemens_, Paris, 1583, tells us that “there is a cloister in Burgundy, by which there is a pond, and in this pond are as many fish as there be monks in the cloister. And when one of the fish swims on the surface of the water and beats with its tail, then one of the monks is ever ill.” But there is a mass of early Christian or un-Christian folklore which identifies “Catholic clergy-women” with fish, even as Quakers are identified in Philadelphia with shad. In Germany all maids just in their teens are called _Backfisch_, that is, pan-fish or _fritures_, from their youth and liveliness, or delicacy. We may read in Friedrich that the fish is a common Christian symbol of immortality, which fully accounts for all legends of certain of them living for ever. The story which I have to tell is as follows:—

LO SPIRITO DELLA VASCA DELLA PORTA SAN GALLO.

“In this fountain-basin is found a pretty little fish, which is always there, and which no one can catch, because it always escapes with great _lestezza_ or agility.

“And this is the queen of all the other fish, or else the Spirit of the Fountain.

“This spirit, while on earth, was a beautiful girl who loved an official, and he fell ill and was in the military hospital.

“The parents of the maid opposed her marriage with this official, though he was so much in love with her that it and anxiety had made him ill. Then the maid became a nun so that she might be near him in illness, and nurse him in his last moments, which indeed came to pass, for he died, nor did she long survive him.

“Then her mother, who had magic power (_essendo stata una fata_ {177}), regretted having opposed her daughter’s love and that of the young man, since it had caused the death of both. And to amend this she so enchanted them that by night both became _folletti_ or spirits haunting the hospital, while by day the maid becomes a little fish living in the fountain. But when seen by night she appears as a pretty little nun (_una bella monachina_), and goes to the hospital to nurse the invalids, for which she has, indeed, a passion. And if any one of them observes her, he feels better, but in that instant she vanishes, and is in the arms of her lover. But sometimes it happens that he becomes jealous of a patient, and then he vexes the poor man in every way, twitching off his covering, and playing him all kinds of spiteful tricks.”

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It is otherwise narrated, in a more consistent, and certainly more traditionally truthful manner, that both the lovers are fish by day and _folletti_ by night. This brings the legend to close resemblance with the undying fish of Bowscale Tarn, recorded in Wordsworth’s beautiful song at the feast of Brougham Castle in the “Poems of the Imagination.”

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“’Tis worth noting,” pens the observant Flaxius on this, “that in days of yore fish, feminines, and fascination were considered so inseparable that Dr. Johannes Christian Fromann wrote a chapter on this mystical trinity, observing that music was, as an attractor, connected with them, as shown by dolphins, syrens, Arions, and things of that sort. And he quoted—yea, in the holy Latin tongue—many instances of fishers who entice their finny prey by playing flutes:

“‘Which thing I doubted till I saw that Doubt
Pursued, its refutation oft begets,
When in America I once found out
That shad were caught by means of castin’ nets!’”