“No, Polly; you remember that we kept it for the winter nights; we agreed Tieck and Chamisso were better for summer evenings—'Quando ridono i prati,' as Petrarch says;” and her eyes brightened, and her cheek glowed as he spoke. “How beautiful was that walk we took on Sunday evening last! That little glen beside the river, so silent, so still, who could think it within a mile or two of a great city? What a delightful thing it is to think, Polly, that they who labor hard in the week—and there are so many of them!—can yet on that one day of rest wander forth and taste of the earth's freshness.
“'L; oro e le perle—i fîor vermegli ed i bianchi.'”
“Confound your balderdash!” cried Fagan, passionately; “you've put me out in the tot—seventeen and twelve, twenty-nine—two thousand nine hundred pounds, with the accruing interest. I don't see that he has added the interest.”
Mr. Crowther bent patiently over the document for a few minutes, and then, taking off his spectacles, and wiping them slowly, said, in his blandest voice: “It appears to me that Mr. Raper has omitted to calculate the interest. Perhaps he would kindly vouchsafe us his attention for a moment.”
Raper was, however, at that moment deaf to all such appeals; his spirit was as though wandering free beneath the shade of leafy bowers or along the sedgy banks of some clear lake.
“You remember Dante's lines, Polly, and how he describes—
“'La divina foresta—
Che agli occhi tempera va il nuovo giorno,
Senza piu aspettar lasciai la riva,
Preudendo la campagna lento lento.'
How beautiful the repetition of the word 'lento;' how it conveys the slow reluctance of his step!”
“There is, to my thinking, even a more graceful instance in Metastasio,” said Polly:—
“'L' onda che mormora, Fra sponda e sponda, L' aura che tremola, Fra fronda e fronda.”