e, he detests trees and adores crowds.
But there are exceptions to all rules: there are poetic natures
everywhere, though everywhere rare: Gesualdo was the exception in Marca
and its neighborhood, and evening after evening saw him in the summer
weather strolling through the fields, his breviary in his hand, but his
heart with the dancing fire-flies, the quivering poplar leaves, the tall
green cane, the little silvery fish darting over the white stones of the
shallow river-waters. He could not have told why he loved to watch these
things: he thought it was because they reminded him of Bocca d'Arno and
the sand-beach and the canebrakes; but he did love them, and they filled
him with that vague emotion, half pleasure, half pain, known to all who
love Nature for herself alone.

His supper over, he went into his church: a little, red-bricked,
whitewashed passage connected it with his parlor. The church was small,
and dark, and old; it had an altar-piece said to be old, and by a
Sienese master, and of some value, but Gesualdo knew nothing of these
matters: a Raphael might have hung there and he would have been none the
wiser. He loved the church, ugly and simple as it was, as a mother loves
a plain child or a dull one because it is hers; and now and then he
preached strange, passionate, pathetic sermons in it, which none of his
people understood, and which he barely understood himself. He had a
sweet, full, far-reaching voice, with an accent of singular melancholy
in it, and as his mystical, romantic, involved phrases passed far over
the heads of his hearers, like a flight of birds flying high up against
the clouds, the pathos and music in his tones stirred their hearts
vaguely. He was certainly, they thought, a man whom the saints loved.
Candida, sitting near the altar with her head bowed and her hands
feeling her rosary, would think, as she heard the unintelligible
eloquence, "Dear Lord, all that power of words, all that skill of the
tongue, and he would put his shirt on bottom upward were it not for me!"

There was no office in his church that evening, but he lingered about
it, touching this thing and the other with tender fingers. There was
always a sweet scent in the little place: its door usually stood open to
the fields amidst which it was planted, and the smell of the incense
which century after century had been burned in it blended with the
fragrance from primroses, or dog-roses, or new-mown hay, or crushed ripe
gra