The boulders are some of them upright and dead like
monolithic castles, some of them prone like sleeping cattle. The
junipers - looking, in their soiled and ragged mourning, like some
funeral procession that has gone seeking the place of sepulchre three
hundred years and more in wind and rain - are daubed in forcibly
against the glowing ferns and heather. Every tassel of their rusty
foliage is defined with pre-Raphaelite minuteness. And a sorry
figure they make out there in the sun, like misbegotten yew-trees!
The scene is all pitched in a key of colour so peculiar, and lit up
with such a discharge of violent sunlight, as a man might live fifty
years in England and not see.
Meanwhile at your elbow some one tunes up a song, words of Ronsard to
a pathetic tremulous air, of how the poet loved his mistress long
ago, and pressed on her the flight of time, and told her how white
and quiet the dead lay under the stones, and how the boat dipped and
pitched as the shades embarked for the passionless land. Yet a
little while, sang the poet, and there shall be no more love; only to
sit and remember loves that might have been.
Pages:
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222