(Note. These verses were really written by a boy of fourteen.)
In a manner such as this the summer hours glided happily away. But all things, happy or mournful, must come to an end, lest we should forget God in our prosperity, or curse Him in our despair. Too quickly for all their wishes their last Sunday in Switzerland had come. Most of them had spent the day in thoughtful retirement or quiet occupations, and both morning and evening they assembled together in their pleasant sitting-room for matins and evensong. Their thoughts were full of the coming separation, and it gave a deep interest to these last services; for the Homes, unwilling to leave their mother and Frank so long alone at Ildown, were to start for England on the following day, and the Kennedys intended to visit Chamounix for two weeks more.
On the Sunday evening they strolled down to the glacier to look once again, for the last time, into its crevices, and wonder at its fairy caverns, fringed with icicles, like rows of silver daggers, and ceiled with translucent sapphire, beneath whose blue fretwork the stray sunbeams lost their way amid ice-blocks of luminous green, and pillars of lapis-lazuli and crystal. They sat on a huge boulder of granite, which some avalanche had torn down, and tumbled from the mountain’s side, and there enjoyed the icy wind which tempered the warm evening air, as it swept over the leaping waves of the glacier stream.
“What a mixture of terror and beauty these monstrous glaciers are,” said Julian; “crawling down the valleys, and shearing away the solid rocks before them like gigantic ploughshares.”
“Yes,” said Eva. “When you look up at the tumbled pinnacles of those séracs, does it not seem as if Summer had rent in anger with some great ice-axe the huge enemy whom she could not quite destroy?”
“And see,” said Mr Kennedy, “how Nature gets out of these terrible heaps of shattered ice both use and beauty; and since she must leave them as the eternal fountains of her rivers, see how she tinges them with her loveliest blue.”
They talked on until it was time to return, but Violet and Kennedy still lingered, sitting on the vast boulder, under pretence of seeing the sunset.
“Well, don’t get lost again, that’s all,” said Cyril sagely.
“Oh no, we shall be back very soon,” answered Violet, but she felt instinctively that the “very soon” in time might measure an eternity of emotion.
Need we say that Kennedy and Violet had, since that night of wild adventure, loved each other, hour by hour, with deeper affection? He was young, and brave, and light-hearted, and of a pleasant countenance; and she was a young, and confiding, and graceful, and lovely girl, and they were drawn to one another with a love which absorbed all other thoughts, and overpowered all other considerations; and it was unspeakable happiness for each to know how lovely were all their acts, and how dear were all their words in the other’s eyes. And now that the time was come to declare the love in words, and ratify it by a plighted troth, there was something in the act so solemn as almost to disturb their dream of a lover’s paradise.