Margaret, toying with a June rose—the white petal delicately tinted with pink between her soft rosy fingers—dreamily repeated half to herself,—
“All the leafy oaks were slumb’rous.”
Valentine glanced at her swiftly, and inwardly resolved to remove the impression on her mind. He took out his pocket-book.
“My verses,” said he, “are only copied, but they seemed to me a gem in their way. It is a piece of Bacchic meditation from the Vaux de Vire, exquisitely translated by some clever author whose name I have forgotten. You are gazing at our friend Augustus’ bibulous nose,” he nodded towards the recumbent figure with the hand on the bottle, “and see it through your own glass:
“Fair nose! whose beauties many pipes have cost
Of white and rosy wine;
Whose colours are so gorgeously embossed
In red and purple fine;
Great nose, who views thee, gazing through great glass,
Thee still more lovely thinks.
Thou dost the nose of creature far surpass
Who only water drinks.”
It was so appropriate to poor Augustus that they could not choose but smile. Valentine begged Margaret to sing: they all joined in the request, and she sang with a faint blush, looking down—for she knew, though the rest did not, that it was Geoffrey’s favourite—the beautiful old ballad of the “Bailiff’s Daughter of Islington.” With the wild-rose in her hand, the delicate bloom on her cheek, the green hedge behind, the green elm above, and the sweet scent of the hay, she looked the ballad as well as sang it.
“Ah,” said Felix, “no sign of study in those old ballads, no premeditation, no word-twisting and jerking; rugged metre so involved that none can understand it without pondering an hour or two. This is the way we criticise poetry now-a-days, in our mechanical age—just listen: somebody has been measuring Tennyson with a foot-rule. I read from a professor’s analysis—‘The line is varied by dactylic or iambic substitution, as well as by truncation and anacrusis;’ ‘the line is varied by anapaestic and trochaic (rarely dactylic) substitutions, and by initial truncation.’ As Faust says, not all these word-twisters have ever made a Maker yet.”
Crash!—splintering of wood and breaking of boughs.
“Here gwoes! Come on, you! Hoorah! Us ull put it up, missus; doan’t ’ee be afeared! you bin a good missus to we. So into’t, you vellers!”
Eight or ten men came crashing through a gap in the hedge, and seizing the prongs and rakes that were lying about with no more explanation than these brief ejaculations, dashed out to work. Heartily tired of rambling idly about, hands in pockets, seeing no prospect of the men on the other farms joining them, they had been hanging round the place in a sheepish way, till, finally observing the ladies working, the sense of shame got the better, and they made a rush for the hay, and gave up the strike. For there is sterling worth and some rude chivalry in these men, though simple enough, and easily led astray; the more the pity that no one has yet taken the lead among them with a view to their own real and solid advancement.