Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Gaston de Latour; an unfinished romance by Walter Pater
page 59 of 122 (48%)
Nantes, Bordeaux, and La Rochelle, to the Indies, in rivalry of
Spanish adventure. The spasmodic gaiety of the time blent with that
of the season of the year, of his own privileged time of life, and
allowed the opulent country through which he was to pass all its
advantages. Ever afterwards that low ring of blue hills beyond La
Beauce meant more for him, not less, than of old. After the reign of
his native apple-blossom and corn, it was that of peach-blossom and
wine. Southwards to Orleans and the Loire then, with the course of
the sunny river, to Blois, to Amboise, to Tours, he traversed a
region of unquestioned natural charm, heightened greatly by the
mental atmosphere through which it reached him. Black Angers, white
Saumur, with its double in the calm broad water below, the melancholy
seigneurial woods of Blois, ranged themselves in his memory as so
many distinct types of what was dignified or pleasant in human
habitations. Frequently, along the great historic stream, as along
some vast street, contemporary genius was visible (a little
prematurely as time would show) in a novel and seductive
architecture, which, by its engrafting of exotic grace on homely
native forms, spoke of a certain restless aspiration to be what one
was not but might become--the old [78] Gaulish desire to be refined,
to be mentally enfranchised by the sprightlier genius of Italy. With
their terraced gardens, their airy galleries, their triumphal
chimney-pieces, their spacious stairways, their conscious provision
for the elegant enjoyment of all seasons in turn, here surely were
the new abodes for the new humanity of this new, poetic, picturesque
age. What but flawless bodies, duly appointed to typically developed
souls, could move on the daily business of life through these dreamy
apartments into which he entered from time to time, finding their
very garniture like a personal presence in them? Was there light
here in the earth itself? It was a landscape, certainly, which did
DigitalOcean Referral Badge