on the steps, where the shadow of the house, covering a verdant square in the midst of the sunshine, looked like a block of verd-antique set in gold.
“It reminds me of the funeral we went to in St. Peter’s,” Mr. Vane said, glancing about the sombre place, and over the walls into the outside splendor. “The mournful pageant looked as small in that bright temple as this villa in the landscape.”
The two girls gathered grasses and leaves and bits of moss, binding them into tiny bouquets to keep as mementos, and Bianca made a sketch of the two villas. They talked but little, and, in that silent and quiescent mood, perceived far more clearly the character and influence of the scene—the melancholy that was not without terror; the proud beauty that survived neglect and decay, and might at any time burst into a triumphant loveliness, if but some one should care to call forth the power hidden there; the dainty graces that would not thrust themselves forward, but waited to be sought. Yet it needed that summer and sunshine should be all about to keep the sadness from being oppressive. With those cheering influences so near and so dominantly larger, the touch of melancholy became a luxury, like a scattering of snow in wine.
Isabel came back to the steps from her ramble about the place, and found her father and the Signora sitting there with no appearance of having uttered a word since she left them.
“It is just the time to read something I found and brought with me from Rome,” she said. “I tucked it into my note-book, see, and something at this moment reminded me of it. Bianca was saying that if the place should be sprinkled with holy
water, she did not doubt that flowers would immediately begin to grow again, and the track was not long from her notion round to this poem. It had no name when I found it, but I call it ‘At Benediction.’ The Signora told me that it was rude and unfinished; but no matter.” She read:
At Benediction.
“Like a dam in which the restless tide
Has washed, till, grain by grain,
It has sapped the solid barrier