The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 05: Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English
Philosophy
The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 05: Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English
German literature -- 19th century -- Translations into English; German literature -- 20th century -- Translations into English
I sprang hastily out of bed, dressed myself, and, looking about my
room, perceived in the wainscoting a small door, which I had not seen
the night before. It was ajar; I opened it, and saw a pretty little
room looking very fresh and neat in the early dawn. Some articles of
feminine apparel were lying in disorder over the back of a chair, and
in a bed beside it lay the girl who had waited upon me the evening
before. She was sleeping soundly, her head resting upon her bare white
arm, over which her black curls were straying. "How mortified she
would be if she knew that the door was open!" I said to myself, and
I crept back into my room, bolting the door after me, that the girl
might not be horrified and ashamed when she awoke.
Not a sound was yet to be heard outside, except from an early robin
that was singing his morning song, perched upon a spray growing out of
the wall beneath my window. "No," said I, "you shall not shame me by
singing all alone your early hymn of praise to God!" I hastily fetched
my fiddle, which I had laid upon the table the night before, and left
the room. Everything in the castle was silent as death, and I was a
long while finding my way through the dim corridors out into the open
air.
There I found myself in a large garden extending half-way down the
mountain, its broad terraces lying one beneath the other like huge
steps. But the gardening was slovenly. The paths were all grass-grown,
the yew figures were not trimmed, but stretched long noses and caps a
yard high into the air like ghosts, so that really they must have been
quite fearsome at nightfall. Linen was hanging to dry on the broken
marble statues of an unused fountain; here and there in the middle
of the garden cabbages were planted beside some common flowers;
everything was neglected, in disorder, and overgrown with tall weeds,
among which glided varicolored lizards. On all sides through the
gigantic old trees there was a distant, lonely prospect of range after
range of mountains stretching as far as the eye could reach.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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