sill, turned my eyes downwards towards the garden, and fell into
a brown study.

Something new to me, something extraordinarily potent and
unfamiliar, had suddenly invaded my soul. The wet ground on
which, here and there, a few yellowish stalks and blades of
bright-green grass were to be seen; the little rivulets
glittering in the sunshine, and sweeping clods of earth and tiny
chips of wood along with them; the reddish twigs of the lilac,
with their swelling buds, which nodded just beneath the window;
the fussy twitterings of birds as they fluttered in the bush
below; the blackened fence shining wet from the snow which had
lately melted off it; and, most of all, the raw, odorous air and
radiant sunlight--all spoke to me, clearly and unmistakably, of
something new and beautiful, of something which, though I cannot
repeat it here as it was then expressed to me, I will try to
reproduce so far as I understood it. Everything spoke to me of
beauty, happiness, and virtue--as three things which were both
easy and possible for me--and said that no one of them could
exist without the other two, since beauty, happiness, and virtue
were one. "How did I never come to understand that before?" I
cried to myself. "How did I ever manage to be so wicked? Oh, but
how good, how happy, I could be--nay, I WILL be--in the future!
At once, at once--yes, this very minute--I will become another
being, and begin to live differently!" For all that, I continued
sitting on the window-sill, continued merely dreaming, and doing
nothing. Have you ever, on a summer's day, gone to bed in dull,
rainy weather, and, waking just at sunset, opened your eyes and
seen through the square space of the window--the space where the
linen blind is blowing up and down, and beating its rod upon the