public places, where strangers and idlers flock during the summer, were
then closed. All were gone, save a few infirm paupers, seated in the
sun, at the door of the lowest description of inns; and some invalids,
past all hope of recovery, who might be seen, during the hottest hours
of the day, dragging their feeble steps along, and treading the
withered leaves that had fallen from the poplars during the night.




IV.


The autumn was mild, but had set in early. The leaves which had been
blighted by the morning frost fell in roseate showers from the vines
and chestnut-trees. Until noon, the mist overspread the valley, like an
overflowing nocturnal inundation, covering all but the tops of the
highest poplars in the plain; the hillocks rose in view like islands,
and the peaks of mountains appeared as headlands in the midst of ocean;
but when the sun rose higher in the heavens, the mild southerly breeze
drove before it all these vapors of earth. The rushing of the
imprisoned winds in the gorges of the mountains, the murmur of the
waters, and the whispering trees, produced sounds melodious or
powerful, sonorous or melancholy, and seemed in a few minutes to run
through the whole range of earth's joys and sorrows its strength or its
melancholy. They stirred up one's very soul, then died away like the
voices of celestial spirits, that pass and disappear. Silence, such as
the ear has no preception of elsewhere, succeeded, and hushed all to
rest. The sky resumed its almost Italian serenity; the Alps stood out
once more against a cloudless sky; the drops from the dissolving mist