However, before going out to dinner,
he gave very particular orders to Stephen.
Eleven o'clock found him in front of the palace, devoured by impatience
and curiosity. The novelty of the situation, the spectacle of the snowy
night, the mystery and uncertainty of it all, inflamed his imagination
and transported him beyond the realities of life.
Over Rome, on that memorable February night, there shone a full moon of
fabulous size and unheard of splendour. In that immense radiance, the
surrounding objects seemed to exist only as in a dream, impalpable,
meteoric, and visible at a great distance by virtue of some fantastic
irradiation of their own. The snow covered the railings of the gateway,
concealing the iron and transforming it into a piece of open-work, more
frail and airy than filigree; while the white-robed Colossi supported it
as oaks support a spider's web. The garden looked like a motionless
forest of enormous and mis-shapen lilies all of ice; a garden under some
lunar enchantment, a lifeless paradise of Selene. Mute, solemn and
massive the Palazzo Barberini reared its great bulk into the sky, its
most salient points standing out dazzlingly white and casting a pale
blue shadow as transparent as light.
He waited, leaning forward on the watch; and under the fascination of
that marvellous spectacle, he felt the spirits that wait on love awake
in him, that the lyric summits of his sentiment began to gleam and
glitter like the frozen shafts of the gateway under the moon.
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