IX
Rosemary and Mignonette
“
Sweet Lady of my Dreams, it cannot be that you are displeased. If you were, I should know, but do not ask me how!
“Day by day, my eyes long for the sight of you; night by night my heart remembers you, for that inner vision does not vanish with the sun. You have unconsciously given me a priceless gift, for wherever I may go, I take you with me—all the grace of you, all the beauty, and all the softness. I have only to close my eyes and then I see.
“But do not think I keep your image always before me, for it is not so. In the work-a-day world, you have no place. You belong, rather, to those fair lands of fancy which lie just beyond the borders of this world and are, or so I think, very near the gleaming gates of Heaven.
“I am not always at work, but sometimes, even when I am, you come tripping before my eyes, so dainty, so wholly exquisite, that I forget what I am doing, and then I must put you aside. But when the day is done, and the light of it shows only through the pinholes pricked in the curtain of night, then I can think of you, as radiant, as beautiful, and as far above me as those very stars.
“All unknowingly, you are the light of my day. Whatever darkness might surround me, your eyes would make it noon. However steep and thorny my path, your hand in mine would make it a sunny meadow, swept by shadowy wings, where the white and crimson clover bloomed all day.