And it seemed to Graham that nowhere, save only in a few poems, and in one or two passages of Plato, he could find the expression of a sentiment even approximating to that he felt for his friend. Many books he turned over, and such lines as caught his fancy he read again and again until he knew them by heart. Those portions of the Sonnets of Shakespeare which were least rhetorical, which appeared to spring from a genuine feeling, he learned in this way. Was not his friend, too, the ‘lord of his love,’ the ‘herald of the spring,’ the ‘lovely boy,’ the ‘rose of beauty,’ ‘music to hear’?—
‘For all that beauty that doth cover thee
Is but the seemly raiment of my heart.’
And again:—
‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
* * * * *
But thy eternal summer shall not fade.’
Nevertheless, it was in two poems by Rossetti, two poems of unsurpassable beauty, The Stream’s Secret and Love’s Nocturn, that he found, or thought he found, what he himself actually felt; their suggestion of a kind of impassioned mysticism appealing to him, being indeed but an echo of that curious vein of mysticism which from the first had entered into and made more wonderful his own love. These poems, altering the gender of the personal pronouns, and thinking of Harold while he said them, he repeated over and over to himself, until in the end they became in his mind so bound up with his friend that he could not have imagined them in any other connection, that he could not have heard them without seeing Harold’s face.
The spring passed quickly; summer was already here; and as Graham, fallen now completely into the ways of his new life, watched one day after another glide swiftly from him, sometimes he longed to stretch out his hand to stay this or that particular hour and keep it with him for ever.
On an afternoon in the beginning of July he had flung himself down in the shade, and was lying on his back among the long, sweet-smelling grass. He had been fielding out for more than an hour under a deep, cloudless sky, and he was a little tired and hot. His straw hat lay on the ground beside him, and he gazed up at the sky through the leafy branches of a tree that stretched above him like a gigantic parasol. The delicious summer heat, the stillness, made him feel rather drowsy; and he let his thoughts wander hither and thither on the wings of every idle fancy. Already the shouts from the cricketers reached him only as a far-off murmur, blended dreamily in his mind with the humming of a great black and yellow striped bee, which flitted noisily from cup to cup of a group of purple fox-gloves growing close at hand.
Days like this were very beautiful, he thought, and this old volcanic earth with its bright delicate covering, like a carpet, of grass and trees and flowers. And life!—yes; and life itself was beautiful! For the same life that was moving joyously within his young warm blood, was moving in the sap of tree and grass. What was it all? Whence did it spring? Every day a miracle was wrought when some delicate leaf, or the spiral of a new-born fern, unfolded itself in the soft air, or pushed up through the dark clinging soil. And this was life! And he was alive! He found an exquisite happiness in the thought that he himself was thus a part of nature, so close to nature in her simpler forms. It was as if—always alive to the charm of such things—he understood now for the first time the full meaning of the old Greek ‘tree-worship,’ realised, as it were, its origin, in his own emotions. That faculty for noting the listening soul, the spirit that is in leaf or plant, seemed to be a part of his very human nature, seemed as some ancient bond of relationship that bound him then, and would bind him for ever, to stiller and less perfect forms of life—to a whole world of pastoral divinities—the great god Pan himself; the Hamadryads, who inhabit the forest trees; and Oreads, and Naiads, and Hyades—the deities of water-springs, and streams, and showers of summer rain.