| | 1 | Author: | Hawthorne
Nathaniel
1804-1864 | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | The marble faun: or, The romance of Monte Beni  | | | | Published: | 2003 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 | | | | Description: | From the old butler, whom he found to be a very
gracious and affable personage, Kenyon soon learned
many curious particulars about the family history and
hereditary peculiarities of the Counts of Monte Beni.
There was a pedigree, the later portion of which — that
is to say, for a little more than a thousand years — a
genealogist would have found delight in tracing out, link
by link, and authenticating by records and documentary
evidences. It would have been as difficult, however, to
follow up the stream of Donatello's ancestry to its dim
source, as travellers have found it to reach the mysterious
fountains of the Nile. And, far beyond the region of
definite and demonstrable fact, a romancer might have
strayed into a region of old poetry, where the rich soil,
so long uncultivated and untrodden, had lapsed into
nearly its primeval state of wilderness. Among those
antique paths, now overgrown with tangled and riotous
vegetation, the wanderer must needs follow his own guidance,
and arrive nowhither at last. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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