Some day when you have come to live in New York—if this is to be our home—we will go together up the river to Tarrytown, and you shall see the land where O’Meara dreamed his dream of happiness and where your adopted child was born.
And when we go there, I will take you to a bowered nook overhanging the river, where I passed the afternoon reading and thinking of many things. There together we will sit in the shadow of the trees and talk and plan together how our happiness, at least, shall be made to endure; and you shall teach me to lose this haunting sense of illusion in the great reality of love. And as the evening descends and twilight steals upon the ever-flowing water, I will take you in my arms a moment, and this shall be my vow: God do so to me and more also, if any darkness falls from my life upon yours, until our evening, too, has come and the light of this world passes quietly into the dream that lies beyond.
All this I thought yesterday while I sat alone and read once more the sad record of O’Meara’s ruin. He did not stay long in Tarrytown, it seems, after his loss, but came back to New York, bringing Jack with him, in the hope that this care might keep him from the old disgrace. Alas, and alas, you know the end! Sometimes apparently the vision of those peaceful days returned to him with piercing sweetness. Above all he associated them—so one may surmise from a number of memoranda—with a new meaning he began to discover in his beloved Virgil. For, somehow, the story of the Æneid became a symbol to him of the illusion of life. Especially the last bewildered, shadowy fight of Turnus, driven by some inner frenzy to his destruction, grew to be the tragedy of his own fall. Many verses from those books he quotes with comments only too clear. And is there not a touch of strange pathos in this memory of his summer joy?—
There the meaning of the Georgics was opened to me as it never was before. The stately lines of precept and the sunny pictures of the lœtas segetes seemed to connect themselves with the smiling scenes about us. The little village lay among broad farm-checkered hills, and the garden behind my house stretched back to the brow of a deep slope. In the cool shadows of the beech trees that edged this hill I used to lie and read through the long summer mornings; and often I would look up from the page, disturbed by the hoarse cawing of the crows as they flew up from the woods or fields nearby and flapped heavily across the valley. The effect of their flight was simple, but laid hold on the imagination in a peculiar manner. As they flew in a horizontal line the sloping hillside appeared to drop away beneath them like the subsiding of a great wave. It was just the touch needed to add a sense of mystic instability to the earth and to subtilise the prosaic farmland into the realm of illusion. Looking at the fields in this glorified light I first understood the language of the poet:
| Flumina amem silvasque inglorius, |
and his pathetic envy of those
| Too happy husbandmen, if but they knew The wonders of their state! |
And when wearied of this wider scene I turned to the garden itself, still I was in Virgil’s haunted world. Some distance from the house was a group of apple trees, under whose protecting branches stood a row of beehives; and nearby, in a tiny rustic arbor, I could sit through many a golden hour and read, while the hum of bees returning home with their burden of honey sounded in my ears. It was there I learned to enjoy the levium spectacula rerum, as he calls the story of his airy tribes; and there in that great quiet of nature,—so wide and solemn that it seemed a reproach against the noisy activities of men,—I learned what the poet meant to signify in those famous lines with which he closes his account of the warring bees:
| These mighty battles, all this tumult of the breast, With but a little scattered earth are brought to rest. |