He wandered
about the ample pile, or along the garden-terrace, with 'his
cogitative faculties immersed in cogibundity of cogitation.' The
terrace terminated at the south-western tower, which, as we have said,
was ruinous and full of owls. Here would Scythrop take his evening
seat, on a fallen fragment of mossy stone, with his back resting
against the ruined wall,--a thick canopy of ivy, with an owl in it,
over his head,--and the Sorrows of Werter in his hand. He had some
taste for romance reading before he went to the university, where, we
must confess, in justice to his college, he was cured of the love of
reading in all its shapes; and the cure would have been radical, if
disappointment in love, and total solitude, had not conspired to bring
on a relapse. He began to devour romances and German tragedies, and,
by the recommendation of Mr Flosky, to pore over ponderous tomes of
transcendental philosophy, which reconciled him to the labour of
studying them by their mystical jargon and necromantic imagery. In
the congenial solitude of Nightmare Abbey, the distempered ideas of
metaphysical romance and romantic metaphysics had ample time and space
to germinate into a fertile crop of chimeras, which rapidly shot up
into vigorous and abundant vegetation.
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