And here and there came whistling through
A leaf that loosely hung.
...
“I saw an old man totter slow,
Wrinkled, and weak, and grey.
He’d hardly strength enough to go
Ever so short a way.”[194]
The leaf and the old man had been seen and remembered, the one for the sake of the other. There were times when Ann, in her gentle way, came very near the heart of things. The three could not have sung so well together if they had not practised different parts. Jane, comparing her own verses with the rest, modestly explained: “I allow my pieces to rank as the leaves which are, you know, always reckoned a necessary and even pleasing part of the bouquet.”
The comparison is hardly just, or if so, they are bright leaves, more striking, though fewer than the flowers.
There is a crisp touch about her simplest work. The verses are better turned than Adelaide’s or Ann’s. She is content to take her subjects from the common stock of moral tales[195], to arrange her nursery pictures in twos and fours; but in spite of convention, her “Morning” is a Reveillé: