A confederate
landscape-painter might daily supply him with food; for water, he
would have to make a nightly tramp as far as to the nearest pond;
and at last, when the hue and cry began to blow over, he might get
gently on the train at some side station, work round by a series of
junctions, and be quietly captured at the frontier.
Thus Fontainebleau, although it is truly but a pleasure-ground, and
although, in favourable weather, and in the more celebrated
quarters, it literally buzzes with the tourist, yet has some of the
immunities and offers some of the repose of natural forests. And
the solitary, although he must return at night to his frequented
inn, may yet pass the day with his own thoughts in the
companionable silence of the trees. The demands of the imagination
vary; some can be alone in a back garden looked upon by windows;
others, like the ostrich, are content with a solitude that meets
the eye; and others, again, expand in fancy to the very borders of
their desert, and are irritably conscious of a hunter's camp in an
adjacent county. To these last, of course, Fontainebleau will seem
but an extended tea-garden: a Rosherville on a by-day.
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