The slight elevation which formed the lower boundary of this little domain, was crowned by a neat stone wall, of sufficient height to prevent the escape of the deer. Nothing of the fence kind was observable elsewhere; for nowhere else was an artificial enclosure needed:—any stray sheep, for example, which should attempt to make its way out of the vale by means of the ravine, would find its progress arrested, after a few yards’ advance, by the precipitous ledge of rock over which tumbled the cascade that had arrested my attention as I first drew near the domain. In short, the only ingress or egress was through a gate occupying a rocky pass in the road, a few paces below the point at which I stopped to reconnoitre the scene.
I have described the brook as meandering very irregularly through the whole of its course. Its two general directions, as I have said, were first from west to east, and then from north to south. At the turn , the stream, sweeping backward, made an almost circular loop , so as to form a peninsula which was very nearly an island, and which included about the sixteenth of an acre. On this peninsula stood a dwelling-house—and when I say that this house, like the infernal terrace seen by Vathek, “ était d’une architecture inconnue dans les annales de la terre ,” I mean, merely, that its tout ensemble struck me with the keenest sense of combined novelty and propriety—in a word, of poetry —(for, than in the words just employed, I could scarcely give, of poetry in the abstract, a more rigorous definition)—and I do not mean that merely outré was perceptible in any respect.
In fact nothing could well be more simple—more utterly unpretending than this cottage. Its marvellous effect lay altogether in its artistic arrangement as a picture . I could have fancied, while I looked at it, that some eminent landscape-painter had built it with his brush.
The point of view from which I first saw the valley, was not altogether , although it was nearly, the best point from which to survey the house. I