After the sculptor's arrival, however, the young Count sometimes
came down from his forlorn elevation, and rambled with him among the
neighboring woods and hills. He led his friend to many enchanting nooks,
with which he himself had been familiar in his childhood. But of late,
as he remarked to Kenyon, a sort of strangeness had overgrown them,
like clusters of dark shrubbery, so that he hardly recognized the places
which he had known and loved so well.
To the sculptor's eye, nevertheless, they were still rich with beauty.
They were picturesque in that sweetly impressive way where wildness, in
a long lapse of years, has crept over scenes that have been once adorned
with the careful art and toil of man; and when man could do no more for
them, time and nature came, and wrought hand in hand to bring them to a
soft and venerable perfection. There grew the fig-tree that had run wild
and taken to wife the vine, which likewise had gone rampant out of
all human control; so that the two wild things had tangled and
knotted themselves into a wild marriage bond, and hung their various
progeny--the luscious figs, the grapes, oozy with the Southern juice,
and both endowed with a wild flavor that added the final charm--on the
same bough together.
In Kenyon's opinion, never was any other nook so lovely as a certain
little dell which he and Donatello visited. It was hollowed in among the
hills, and open to a glimpse of the broad, fertile valley. A fountain
had its birth here, and fell into a marble basin, which was all covered
with moss and shaggy with water-weeds. Over the gush of the small
stream, with an urn in her arms, stood a marble nymph, whose nakedness
the moss had kindly clothed as with a garment; and the long trails and
tresses of the maidenhair had done what they could in the poor thing's
behalf, by hanging themselves about her waist, In former days--it might
be a remote antiquity--this lady of the fountain had first received the
infant tide into her urn and poured it thence into the marble basin.
But now the sculptured urn had a great crack from top to bottom; and the
discontented nymph was compelled to see the basin fill itself through
a channel which she could not control, although with water long ago
consecrated to her.
For this reason, or some other, she looked terribly forlorn; and you
might have fancied that the whole fountain was but the overflow of her
lonely tears.
"This was a place that I used greatly to delight in," remarked
Donatello, sighing. "As a child, and as a boy, I have been very happy
here."
"And, as a man, I should ask no fitter place to be happy in," answered
Kenyon. "But you, my friend, are of such a social nature, that I should
hardly have thought these lonely haunts would take your fancy. It is
a place for a poet to dream in, and people it with the beings of his
imagination."