All round both these rooms grow trailing plants, that hang over the aviaries like great green plumes, and when night falls and the Chinese lanterns are lit, and the fountains all playing, the whole place is indeed like a fairy palace.
But it is summer on the occasion of this visit of ours, the grass is green, and flowers are everywhere out of doors, in beds and rockeries, peeping through the moss, hiding under trees, and covering every porch and verandah with masses of foliage and lovely flowers.
Book One—Chapter Four.
Gipsy Life.
“Calmly the happy days flew on,
Unnumbered in their flight.”
Anon.
“Moon the shroud shall lap thee fast,
And the sleep be on thee cast,
That shall ne’er know waking.
Haste thee, haste thee to be gone!
Earth flits fast, and time draws on—
Gasp thy gasp, and groan thy groan,
Day is near the breaking.”
Scott: “The Dying Gipsy’s Dirge.”
Scene: The ante-room of the fairy palace, Effie reading, Leonard listening. Don Caesar de Bazan and Lady Purr-a-Meow all attention.
Man never is but always to be blest. The delightful and happy life our Leonard and Effie had lived all the long sweet summer through could surely—one would think—have left nothing to be desired.
Both were little naturalists in their way, though they did not know it; both were poets also, though they wrote no verses, for their hearts were attuned to the music of the wild woods, the song of birds, the rippling laughter of the rill, the whisper of the low wind through the trees, or even the dash of the cataract and roar of the storm. No beetle or other insect was there, in all the romantic country through which they passed on their way to and from school, that they did not know all about; every wild flower was a friend; and the little furry denizens of the forest, that dwelt in old tree stumps, or had their cosy nests among the verdant moss or the beds of pine-needles—all knew them, and never fled at their approach.