Strew green bay and yellow broom
On the silence of my tomb;
And, still giving as you gave,
Milk a she-goat at my grave.
For, though life and joy be fled,
Dear are love-gifts to the dead.’[1]
[1] The Poet has since told me that these lines are a free paraphrase of an idyll by Leonidas of Tarentum, who lived in the time of Pyrrhus.
Then up we got, and onward we went, past rocks, and waves, and arbutus, and white heath,—not the white heath of home, but towering and flowering fifteen or even twenty feet into the air,—and Cineraria maritima, and Bacchic ivy, groups of eucalyptus and acacia, and glimpses of hill and sky, with here and there a hurrying zigzag torrent. What seaweed there was, was golden, and the surging and swirling of the silvery water over and among it and the red rocks was strangely beautiful. The liliputian waves kept coming on and breaking, as in any other sea, but never advancing. As Lamia said, what motion there was seemed purposeless motion, resembling the sport of children rather than the work of grown-up people. But her greatest delight was yet to come; for, late that afternoon, she beheld the first orange-grove glittering and glistening on the sunny outskirts of a gray-roofed little town, whose bright green jalousies more than relieved what would otherwise have seemed its somewhat sombre aspect. Thoughtful Veronica made her take the seat in the carriage where she might command them best, and her spoken raptures were what we all, though more travelled than she, silently felt.
‘O, the Garden that you love is nothing, nothing, nothing, compared with this, which is not a garden at all, but a fairy grove of light and lustre. Do let us stop and pluck some of the golden fruit!’
‘Better not,’ said Veronica, ‘for doing so might dissipate your dream. They are lovely to look at, but indifferent to the taste. Neither is it their best season. Wait to gather oranges till, if ever, you are at Sorrento in the heart of May.’