distilled from the flowers that grow in the vale of Enna--all in my
Spanish domains.

From the windows of those castles look the beautiful women whom I have
never seen, whose portraits the poets have painted. They wait for me
there, and chiefly the fair-haired child, lost to my eyes so long ago,
now bloomed into an impossible beauty. The lights that never shone,
glance at evening in the vaulted halls, upon banquets that were never
spread. The bands I have never collected, play all night long, and
enchant the brilliant company, that was never assembled, into silence.

In the long summer mornings the children that I never had, play in the
gardens that I never planted. I hear their sweet voices sounding low
and far away, calling, "Father! Father!" I see the lost fair-haired
girl, grown now into a woman, descending the stately stairs of my
castle in Spain, stepping out upon the lawn, and playing with those
children. They bound away together down the garden; but those voices
linger, this time airily calling, "Mother! mother!"

But there is a stranger magic than this in my Spanish estates. The
lawny slopes on which, when a child, I played, in my father's old
country place, which was sold when he failed, are all there, and not a
flower faded, nor a blade of grass sere. The green leaves have not
fallen from the spring woods of half a century ago, and a gorgeous
autumn has blazed undimmed for fifty years, among the trees I
remember.

Chestnuts are not especially sweet to my palate now, but those with
which I used to prick my fingers when gathering them in New Hampshire
woods are exquisite as ever to my taste, when I think of eating them