Mais priez Dieu que tous nous vueille absouldre!”
There was a great pathos in the broad English accent with which he murmured the old French words, and for the first time in all his life Sylvester understood them. He raised his head and saw his father's lips moving dumbly. After a little the voice came again, broken and faint, and only by a word here and there could he gather the meaning. It was from Swinburne's “Garden of Proserpine:”
“... Even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea,”
He repeated the couplet two or three times. He had never been a great reader of poetry, but of some half-dozen poems he was particularly fond, and had made them his own, and had woven them into the texture of his life. Among them were such dissimilar things as Villon's “Ballade,” Macaulay's “Battle of Ivry,” Tennyson's “Brook,” “The Ancient Mariner,” and Sylvester had often smiled indulgently at this little anthology, his father's simple spiritual equipment. Especially had he wondered at his assimilation of this poem of Swinburne's, so remote in feeling from his steadfast outlook upon life, and his intolerance of cowardly shrinking from its responsibilities.
But now he comprehended that his father was a weary, weary man, and that one of the most beautiful of all utterances to the weary man's heart had brought him comfort.
“Then star nor sun shall waken,
Nor any change of light;
Nor sound of waters shaken,
Nor any sound or sight;