looked more like green Genoese
velvet than any thing else. It was grass, clearly--but grass such as we
seldom see out of England--so short, so thick, so even, and so vivid in
color. Not a single impediment lay in the wheel-route--not even a chip
or dead twig. The stones that once obstructed the way had been carefully
placed--not thrown-along the sides of the lane, so as to define its
boundaries at bottom with a kind of half-precise, half-negligent, and
wholly picturesque definition. Clumps of wild flowers grew everywhere,
luxuriantly, in the interspaces.

What to make of all this, of course I knew not. Here was art
undoubtedly--that did not surprise me--all roads, in the ordinary sense,
are works of art; nor can I say that there was much to wonder at in the
mere excess of art manifested; all that seemed to have been done, might
have been done here--with such natural "capabilities" (as they have
it in the books on Landscape Gardening)--with very little labor and
expense. No; it was not the amount but the character of the art which
caused me to take a seat on one of the blossomy stones and gaze up and
down this fairy--like avenue for half an hour or more in bewildered
admiration. One thing became more and more evident the longer I
gazed: an artist, and one with a most scrupulous eye for form, had
superintended all these arrangements. The greatest care had been taken
to preserve a due medium between the neat and graceful on the one hand,
and the pittoresque, in the true sense of the Italian term, on the
other. There were few straight, and no long uninterrupted lines. The
same effect of curvature or of color appeared twice, usually, but not
oftener, at any one point of view. Everywhere was variety in uniformity.
It was a piece of "composition," in which the most fastidiously critical
taste could scarcely have suggested an emendation.

I had turned to the right as I entered this road, and now, arising, I
continued in the same direction. The path was so serpentine, that at
no moment could I trace its course for more than two or three paces in
advance. Its character did not undergo any material change.

Presently the murmur of water fell gently upon my ear--and in a few
moments afterward, as I turned with the road somewhat more abruptly than
hitherto, I became aware that a building of some kind lay at the foot
of a gentle declivity just before me. I could see nothing distinctly on
account of the mist which occupied all the l