‘A short life and a merry one,’ said Lamia: ‘an ideal existence.’
‘But do not let us forget,’ I observed, ‘that when this brief exuberant blending of Spring and Summer has passed away from the garden, the purple and opal bunches of the festooned and trellised vine come timely to take its place.’
‘Nor,’ added the Poet, ‘should we omit that bewitching preliminary to the profuse period you speak of, when, as now, in whichever direction you look or ramble in that astonishing valley, almond and peach, plum-blossom, pear-blossom, and apple-bloom, fleck with their rich rival tints, from purest white to rosiest pink, the silvery spray of the ubiquitous olives.’
‘Silvery till ruffled by the wind,’ he went on, ‘as Lorenzo so admirably describes it in his poem on the Ambra.
‘L’uliva, in qualche dolce piaggia aprica,
Secondo il vento par, or verde, or bianca.‘
‘What an incautious quotation!’ said Lamia; ‘and, were I a critic, I should at once fasten on you a charge of gross plagiarism. I remember, if you do not:—
‘The smiling slopes with olive groves bedecked,
Now darkly green, now, as the breeze did stir,
Spectral and white, as though the air were flecked