"In the hair, nature is most an imitator. The cascade caressing the precipice with the threads of its silver locks, which the teeth of the granite comb have frizled, and which the winds play at gambol with, is only a copy. So with the vine on the rock—the great vine whose metallic tendrils I have looked on and wondered at when the sunshine spanned them with a cloven halo. So with the drooping moss—the Barba Espagna, with its drapery of gold held by threads of spun alabaster, hanging in hard festoons from the tree beside the Lagoon and sighing when its hues die with the sunlight. And so with the boughs of our weeping trees. O, but are not these last most beautiful? Place your ear to the soft grass-blades on the brink of a valley brook, and listen to the monotone of the willow's stirred ringlets, and watch them as the wind lifts them from the eddy beneath to float, bejewelled by adhering globules. And then look upon them as with the abating wind they sink lower and lower, leaving their cool rain upon your cheek. See them trail in the pebbly waters and conjure up in each detached leaf an Elfin barque laden with its rare boatmen and tiny beauties. Hear the tinkle of the little bells and the shrieks of the wrecked mariners, as they cling to the hair of the willow (as Zal clung to the locks of his mistress) and splash the brook into foam. And now they leap to the backs of their skipper steeds, and ply the spur of the thistle seed, and gallop off for the green shore, wringing their hands and bewailing the ill fate of their holiday trim. Such marvellous fancies, if you are fanciful, will prick your brain until the drowsy sough of the tree-hair and the renewed trickle of the raining spray lend your eyes sleep and call forth the dream spirit, as the fly from its cocoon, and give it the wings of wilder vagary to flutter away withal—whither? Mine would return to my wanderings by Goluon with her whose tomb in the valley of sweet waters often pillows my head."
Alas for my poor friend Bob! He died of a broken heart—that is to say mediately. He died im-mediately of hard drinking. Napoleon remembered the Seine on his death-bed and asked to be buried upon its sunniest bank; Bob remembered Goluon when his great temples had the death-damp upon them. His vision had failed him; his nose had become peaked; his body, like a jaded and worn hack, had fallen under the spirit, which like a stout horseman had long kept it to its paces; but the little abiding place of memory had not been destroyed, and poor Bob muttered at times of a dead lady with fair hair—of a valley of sweet waters—of a grave with two willows above it—of pleasant Goluon—and died with an unuttered prayer upon his lips, and with a strong desire at his heart. The prayer was, that I, his friend, would bury him between the two willows—on the evening bank of Goluon—side by side with Betty Manning his old sweetheart. Poor Bob! May God take kind care of his soul!
V.
| "I much lament that nevermore to me Can come fleet pulse, bright heart, and frolic mood; I much lament that nevermore may be My tame step light, my wan cheek berry-hued." |
In the lines just quoted, the poet (old Philip Allen, a Welshman) strikes the proper key. When we have ceased to derive pleasure from that which once afforded it to us, we should regard the change as in ourselves. The grass of the hill is as green as it ever was, but the step once "light" has become "tame." The bird sings as sweetly as ever, but the "bright heart" into which the "honey drops of his constant song" once fell, has been dimmed and darkened by human passions. The berry-clusters are still in the fringe of the thicket, but the palate has no longer any relish for them. We have changed. Yet we are apt to believe the change any where rather than in ourselves. Indeed we are for the most part like Launcelot in the play.
Gobbo.—"Lord worshipped might he be! What a beard hast thou got! Thou hast more hair on thy chin than Dobbin my thill horse, has on his tail."
Launcelot.—"It would seem then that Dobbin's tail grows backward. I am sure that he had more hair on his tail than I had on my face when I last saw him."
It was the chin of Launcelot that had undergone the change, and not the tail of his father Gobbo's thill horse Dobbin.