"What can I do against that immortal music?" he said absently, alluding to the nightingale.
"Hark how the bursts come crowding through the trees.
What passion, and what pain."
"You don't know Matthew Arnold's poems, I suppose, Lady Errington?"
"Ah! you are wrong there," she replied quietly. "I am very fond of his melancholy verse."
"Very melancholy," he answered musingly. "I agree with you there. I wonder, if in the whole range of English literature, there is a more bitterly true line than that famous one:
"'We mortal millions live alone.'"
"That is not my favourite," said Alizon dreamily, "I like that couplet:
"'And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb'd salt estranging sea.'"
"It means very much the same thing," observed Eustace after a pause, "and it's in the same poem, I think. But how true it is! Lovers, friends, married or single, we all live alone, isolated by the 'estranging sea.' No one really knows the heart of a fellow-creature."
"But surely if a perfect harmony exists----"