The flowers which
played then among the grass, the water which rippled past in the sunshine,
the whole landscape which served as environment to their apparition
lingers around the memory of them still with its unconscious or unheeding
air; and, certainly, when they were slowly scrutinised by this humble
passer-by, by this dreaming child--as the face of a king is scrutinised by
a petitioner lost in the crowd--that scrap of nature, that corner of a
garden could never suppose that it would be thanks to him that they would
be elected to survive in all their most ephemeral details; and yet the
scent of hawthorn which strays plundering along the hedge from which, in a
little while, the dog-roses will have banished it, a sound of footsteps
followed by no echo, upon a gravel path, a bubble formed at the side of a
waterplant by the current, and formed only to burst--my exaltation of mind
has borne them with it, and has succeeded in making them traverse all
these successive years, while all around them the one-trodden ways have
vanished, while those who thronged those ways, and even the memory of
those who thronged those trodden ways, are dead.
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