Or last of all, there comes before me that bright September when we
walked through the deserted, still flowering garden of a forsaken palace
on the bank of a great river--not Russian--under the soft brilliance of
the cloudless sky. Oh, how put into words what we felt! The endlessly
flowing river, the solitude and peace and bliss, and a kind of
voluptuous melancholy, and the thrill of rapture, the unfamiliar
monotonous town, the autumn cries of the jackdaws in the high sun-lit
treetops, and the tender words and smiles and looks, long, soft,
piercing to the very in-most soul, and the beauty, beauty in our lives,
about us, on all sides--it is above words. Oh, the bench on which we sat
in silence with heads bowed down under the weight of feeling--I cannot
forget it till the hour I die! How delicious were those few strangers
passing us with brief greetings and kind faces, and the great quiet
boats floating by (in one--dost thou remember?--stood a horse pensively
gazing at the gliding water), the baby prattle of the tiny ripples by
the bank, and the very bark of the distant dogs across the water, the
very shouts of the fat officer drilling the red-faced recruits yonder,
with outspread arms and knees crooked like grasshoppers!... We both felt
that better than those moments nothing in the world had been or would be
for us, that all else... But why compare? Enough... enough... Alas! yes:
enough.