At Sunset, When I Was Walking On Alone, While The Horses Rested, I
Arrived Upon A Little Scene, Which, By One Of Those Singular Mental
Operations Of Which We Are All Conscious, Seemed Perfectly Familiar
To Me, And Which I See Distinctly Now.
There was not much in it.
In the blood red light, there was a mournful sheet of water, just
stirred by the evening wind; upon its margin a few trees.
In the
foreground was a group of silent peasant girls leaning over the
parapet of a little bridge, and looking, now up at the sky, now
down into the water; in the distance, a deep bell; the shade of
approaching night on everything. If I had been murdered there, in
some former life, I could not have seemed to remember the place
more thoroughly, or with a more emphatic chilling of the blood; and
the mere remembrance of it acquired in that minute, is so
strengthened by the imaginary recollection, that I hardly think I
could forget it.
More solitary, more depopulated, more deserted, old Ferrara, than
any city of the solemn brotherhood! The grass so grows up in the
silent streets, that any one might make hay there, literally, while
the sun shines. But the sun shines with diminished cheerfulness in
grim Ferrara; and the people are so few who pass and re-pass
through the places, that the flesh of its inhabitants might be
grass indeed, and growing in the squares.
I wonder why the head coppersmith in an Italian town, always lives
next door to the Hotel, or opposite:
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