Under these circumstances, ladies, philosophers, and prelates considered the country a perfect setting for the intellectual life. They there got deeper, intenser spiritual enjoyment than in the city (though city life in those days was not such a rush and bustle as it is to-day). The dread hours of solitude will themselves contribute to this pleasure if you know how to bring a delightful egotism unobtrusively into play; they will enable you to recall many fleeting thoughts, to ruminate on them, feast on them for your sole pleasure, in the spirit of the sublime preoccupation of Lucullus when he chanced one day to be dining alone: “Is not Lucullus entertaining Lucullus to-day?” We find, then, in the country the same _mise-en-scène_ as in the town—the same furniture, the same plate, but ranged under the luminous ceiling of a summer sky; the same dances, but by the light of torches and the stars.[212] All Nature breathes and thinks: the trees, artistically shaped, hang their sombre drapery behind statues; charming walks wind or disappear among labyrinths of laurel, thyme, and rosemary; a cascade leaps lightly and with musical bickering from a tiny artificial rock, and speeds away swiftly but noiselessly into the miniature presentment of a well-mown meadow. Or if the owner’s wealth is equal to measuring itself royally against Nature, he adorns the landscape with splendid villas, the glory of Rome, like the Este villa at Tivoli, a sort of proof before letters of Versailles, so moving still in the spectral life of its deserted groves, its silent fountains, its shattered marbles.