But "here's a penny for yourself," said she, "and it's a most respectable house."
And that was my first introduction to English respectability.
No wonder that I preferred Parisian wickedness!
PARIS REVISITED
Other days come back on me
With recollected music, though the tone
Is changed and solemn, like the cloudy groan
Of dying thunder on the distant wind.
Byron.
The stock-in-trade of the ten-a-penny poets includes a serviceable allusion to the pleasure derivable from a re-visit, after a prolonged absence to a familiar scene of earlier years.
The wanderer, returning in a snowstorm, sees the dear old gables from afar, bathed in tender memories and moonshine. The snow lies in crystal heaps on the well-remembered window-sill; and the apple-trees in the backyard are loaded with frequent blossom. The boats are darting o'er the curly bay, the nightingales are singing blythe and free, the little lambs on the icy peaks skip up and down the flowering willow, and the wanderer's aged parents are standing on their heads under the ancestral fig-tree.