Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes within another’s eyes see clear;
When one world-deafened ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caressed,
A bolt is shot back somewhere in the heart,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again;
The eye sinks inward and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean we say,
And what we would we know.”
There was a day which, to me, will ever be my day of days—halcyon hours of joy and gladness, coloured by a setting of wondrous beauty, and burdened by the fateful shadow of an inevitable parting that would, in all human probability, be the point where two lives, which had grown strangely and sweetly close, must divide, without any hope of re-uniting. You remember how in that early dawn we drove through the dewy grass, covered with the fairies’ dainty white gossamer kerchiefs, lace cobwebs spread out to dry in the morning sun; and, as we left the town and made for the distant mountains, the dark red road wound up and down hills, through orchards and grass-land and forest, till we gained a little village, where the road forked, and a clear, rain-swollen stream slipped swiftly past the picturesque brown cottages. Whilst the horses were being changed, we strolled a little way down the road, and watched a group of laughing urchins, playing in that lilied stream like water-babies. How they screamed with delight as their small glistening bodies emerged from the shining water to struggle up a crazy ladder that led from the back of a hut down into the winding stream; and how the sun shone! lighting the snow-white plumage of a brood of solemn-looking ducks, sailing majestically round the sedge-girt edges of a tiny pool beneath the bridge. In that pool was mirrored a patch of clear blue sky, and across it fell the shadows cast by a great forest tree. That was “a day in spring, a day with thee and pleasure!” Then, as we drove on, there were heavenly glimpses of sapphire hills, seen down long vistas through the forest. For the last few miles, the road followed the bank of a deep and rapid river, whose clear waters reflected the graceful overhanging trees, while the banks were buried in a thick maze of ferns and grasses, and great shining patches of buttercups and marigolds.