see the pictures in the palace, and also the garden, if it were possible.
After some sharp questioning, which I answered very simply and directly, the gate was opened, and I entered the court. The garden rose behind the palace in broad terraces upon the hill-side, and I went directly toward it. The custode, who told me she was the only servant left in the house, the Marquis being in Rome, disappeared, and I passed up the broken, crumbling steps of the terrace in entire solitude. The garden was fallen into decay. Weeds grew and glittered in the walks. The long, narrow avenues of cypress and ilex were not smooth and clipped, but untrimmed boughs and shoots leaned out beyond the line and towered in slim, swaying twigs above. In the misshapen niches of this green wall stood broken statues of discolored marble; fauns holding to their mouths hands whence the pipes had fallen; and nymphs who held vases and flowers no longer. In carrefours, where the paths crossed, were huge globular vases, broken and stained, but overflowing with the leathery leaves of the aloe, like jagged green flame flaring and falling. The great plants burst out luxuriantly from the crevices of the walls, and lay sprawled over them, lazily sucking the sun, while the lizards darted among them, half-loathsome miniatures of crocodiles; and high over all, the dome-topped stone-pines lay like heavy bars of cloud in the glittering air. In the universal sunshine and ruin, there were only silence, sadness, and decay.
I passed along, perplexed with a strange and nameless sorrow, and sat down upon the crumbling stone margin of a fountain, long since dry, and in whose basin lay pebbles and twigs. A reverie in n decayed garden naturally decks the trees again with the splendor of long-vanished summers, trims them as they had once been trimmed, and throngs the paths and the arbors with that host of the young and beautiful which the Imagination accords to all gardens, and palaces, and happy haunts. But as I sat and dreamed, I felt myself seized with the spell of mysterious horror which I had perceived in the padrone at the inn, and saying with him, "God forgive us all our sins!" I arose and strolled along the melancholy avenues, and descending the terraces, entered the house.
