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. There is a
falling flourish in the air that remains in the memory and comes
back in incongruous places, on the seat of hansoms or in the warm
bed at night, with something of a forest savour.
'You can get up now,' says the painter; 'I'm at the background.'
And so up you get, stretching yourself, and go your way into the
wood, the daylight becoming richer and more golden, and the shadows
stretching farther into the open. A cool air comes along the
highways, and the scents awaken. The fir-trees breathe abroad
their ozone. Out of unknown thickets comes forth the soft, secret,
aromatic odour of the woods, not like a smell of the free heaven,
but as though court ladies, who had known these paths in ages long
gone by, still walked in the summer evenings, and shed from their
brocades a breath of musk or bergamot upon the woodland winds.
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