Dunsford. What has Ellesmere got in his head?
Milverton. I see. There is a passage where Faust, in his most discontented mood, falls foul of history—in his talk to Wagner, if I am not mistaken.
Dunsford. How beautiful it is this evening! Look at that yellow-green near the sunset.
Milverton. The very words that Coleridge uses. I always think of them when I see that tint.
Dunsford. I daresay his words were in my mind, but I have forgotten what you allude to.
Milverton.
“O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood,
To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo’d,
All this long eve, so balmy and serene,
Have I been gazing on the western sky,
And its peculiar tint of yellow-green:
And still I gaze—and with how blank an eye!
And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,
That give away their motion to the stars;
Those stars that glide behind them or between,
Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:
Yon crescent Moon as fixed as if it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;
I see them all so excellently fair,
I see, not feel how beautiful they are.”
Dunsford. Admirable! In the Ode to Dejection, is it not? where, too, there are those lines,
“O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live.”
Milverton. But here comes Ellesmere with triumphant look. You look as jovial, my dear Ellesmere, as if you were a Bentley that had found a false quantity in a Boyle.