ruin; but this house, still standing, though being slowly destroyed by
an avenging hand, contained a secret, an unrevealed thought. At the
very least, it testified to a caprice. More than once in the evening I
boarded the hedge, run wild, which surrounded the enclosure. I braved
scratches, I got into this ownerless garden, this plot which was no
longer public or private; I lingered there for hours gazing at the
disorder. I would not, as the price of the story to which this strange
scene no doubt was due, have asked a single question of any gossiping
native. On that spot I wove delightful romances, and abandoned myself
to little debauches of melancholy which enchanted me. If I had known
the reason--perhaps quite commonplace--of this neglect, I should have
lost the unwritten poetry which intoxicated me. To me this refuge
represented the most various phases of human life, shadowed by
misfortune; sometimes the peace of the graveyard without the dead, who
speak in the language of epitaphs; one day I saw in it the home of
lepers; another, the house of the Atridae; but, above all, I found
there provincial life, with its contemplative ideas, its hour-glass
existence. I often wept there, I never laughed.

"More than once I felt involuntary terrors as I heard overhead the
dull hum of the wings of some hurrying wood-pigeon. The earth is dank;
you must be on the watch for lizards, vipers, and frogs, wandering
about with the wild freedom of nature; above all, you must have no
fear of cold, for in a few moments you feel an icy cloak settle on
your shoulders, like the Commendatore's hand on Don Giovanni's neck.

"One evening I felt a shudder; the wind had turned an old rusty
weathercock, and the creaking sounded like a cry from the house, at
the very moment when I was finishing a gloomy drama to account for
this monumental embodiment of woe. I returned to my inn, lost in