The artist’s hand moved involuntarily to the pouch in which he was won’t to carry his sketch-book, but he did not draw it forth; his soul was too deeply absorbed in admiration to permit of his doing aught but gaze in silence.
“This repays my toils,” he resumed, soliloquising rather than speaking to March. “’Twere worth a journey such as I have taken, twice repeated, to witness such a scene as this.”
“Ay, ain’t it grand?” said March, delighted to find such congenial enthusiasm in the young painter.
Bertram turned his eyes on his companion, and, in doing so, observed the wild rose at his side.
“Ah! sweet rose,” he said, stooping eagerly down to smell it.
“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”
“He was no poet who wrote that, anyhow,” observed March with a look of disdain.
“You are wrong, friend. He was a good poet and true.”
“Do you mean to tell me that the sweetness o’ that rose is wasted here?”
“Nay, I do not say that. The poet did not mean to imply that its sweetness is utterly wasted, but to assert the fact that, as far as civilised man is concerned, it is so.”