“With all my heart.”
The friends resigned themselves to sleep. Blessed be the man who first invented sleeping. There is poetry in sleep: there is music in it.
Have you never watched the young child, with its fair hair reposing so quietly in clustering curls around its cherub, happy face? Its low, soft-breathing—one little dimpled hand grasping a toy—one fair, rounded arm pillowing its young head. The little rosy mouth in a half smile—smiling to the fairies that come whispering to its heart? This is poetry. Were you never in a stage-coach with an old man for one of its passengers, clad in the greasiest snuff-colored coat and vest imaginable; and bearing upon them any quantity of dull brass buttons—a round-crowned, dirty white beaver upon his red-haired Medusa-like head: he himself fast “locked in the arms of omnibus,” and snoring loud enough to awake the seven sleepers? This is music.
Morning came. The landlord was duly paid, and the cousins proceeded on their way to Beverly Park.
“Three years seems a long time to be away from one’s home, eh! Ned?” said Frank, after they had ridden a long way in silence. “I hope you will like my sister Clara.”
“I do not doubt that I shall, if she is any thing like her brother.”
“Thank you. These are fine old elms, are they not? I like elm trees; I like them in the moonlight, when the silver-tipped shadows flit among their dark green leaves; they bring to mind old ruined castles. I can fancy ivy-clad turrets, and the soft eyes of fairy maidens gazing from them. Their eyes, as they gleam forth from amid the night-colored boughs, look dreamy and fitful. I see them twine, with snowy, shadowy arms the dark green ivy amid their coal-black tresses. I love elm trees thus bathed in moonlight, they remind me of all the wild things I have ever read, thought or dreamed.”
“Have a care, Frank, or some one of these same moonlight nights your imagination will carry you off vi et armis.”
“Never fear, Ed. But here is my home. My father had taste, had he not?”
“All around is the perfection of taste. Your father must have spent much of his time in planning such a Paradise.”