lips! There I sang without thinking; here
I thought without singing! there I had never had a bosom-friend; here
the affection of an idiot would be divinely welcome! "If only I had a
dog to love!" I sighed--and regarded with wonder my past self, which
preferred the company of book or pen to that of man or woman; which, if
the author of a tale I was enjoying appeared, would wish him away that I
might return to his story. I had chosen the dead rather than the living,
the thing thought rather than the thing thinking! "Any man," I said
now, "is more than the greatest of books!" I had not cared for my
live brothers and sisters, and now I was left without even the dead to
comfort me!

The wood thinned yet more, and the pines grew yet larger, sending up
huge stems, like columns eager to support the heavens. More trees of
other kinds appeared; the forest was growing richer! The roses wore now
trees, and their flowers of astonishing splendour.

Suddenly I spied what seemed a great house or castle; but its forms were
so strangely indistinct, that I could not be certain it was more than a
chance combination of tree-shapes. As I drew nearer, its lines yet held
together, but neither they nor the body of it grew at all more definite;
and when at length I stood in front of it, I remained as doubtful of its
nature as before. House or castle habitable, it certainly was not; it
might be a ruin overgrown with ivy and roses! Yet of building hid in the
foliage, not the poorest wall-remnant could I discern. Again and again
I seemed to descry what must be building, but it always vanished before
closer inspection. Could it be, I pondered, that the ivy had embraced a
huge edifice and consumed it, and its interlaced branches retained the
shapes of the walls it had assimilated?--I could be sure of nothing
concerning the appearance.

Before me was a rectangular vacancy--the ghost of a doorway without a
door: I stepped through it, and found myself in an open space like a
great hall, its floor covered with grass and flowers, its walls and roof
of ivy and vine, mingled with roses.

There could be no better place in which to pass the night! I gathered
a quantity of withered leaves, laid them in a corner, and threw myself
upon them. A red sunset filled the hall, the night was warm, and my
couch restful; I lay gazing up at the live ceiling, with its tracery
of branches and twigs, its clouds of foliage, and peeping patches of
loftier roof. My eyes we