My chapel will need few words. It would be merely a crucifix, silence, and sunlight.
I said that there would be no librarian in my library, similarly there would be no gardener in my garden, no priest in my chapel. The places of the soul need no custodians. The worshippers are the priests.
Of course, I should expect to indulge many an idle fancy and picturesque whim in my castle-in-Spain but they would take too long to tell of. Here I have but set down what I conceive to be the reasonable necessities of a dream. I have said nothing, for example, of my treasure-caves beneath the castle, vaults lit by enormous carbuncles, and filled with countless coffers of bronze, overflowing with ancient coins and precious stones. Nor have I spoken of my paradise of butterflies, a great enclosed garden where I would rear all the flower-winged things that, like illuminated letters or the painted souls of Japanese girls, flit and flicker through the sunlit world. Nor have I told of my palace of serpents, where python and cobra and all the ringed, gliding, spangled creatures that hiss and sting should coil about tropical trees, and sleep their mysterious sleep, or fall down like lightning on their paralysed prey. Then, too, I might tell of my great aquarium where, at ease in my luxurious diving-bell, I would lie all day watching iridescent fishes all flounced and frilled with rainbows, and slow-moving elemental shapes that brood eternally at the bottom of the sea.
A hundred other such fancies I shall hope to indulge in my castle-in-Spain, and one more I must not forget, for no castle would be complete without it--the oubliette. Into that I would fling all my sorrows and cares, and all--unwelcome visitors.
When I was a child there grew at the back of my father’s house a deep wood. It may not have been so vast in extent as it seemed to me; but to my childish imagination it seemed boundless, endless, dark and dense, and infinitely mysterious. It frightened me, yet the fear was full of fascination. Delicious was the thrill with which sometimes in my lonely rambles I would venture a few steps further within its haunted recesses than I was wont to have courage for. As a rule, I restricted my explorations to its sunlit margins, and, so soon as I found myself among the shadows, would fly back with a beating heart into the sun.
