Page:Friendship, by Ouida.djvu/205

 glance at his mother's portrait, and know that he had sinned and met his retribution.

In these old noble places life should be 'set to music:' Love, in its highest passion and its fairest forms; Art as the gift of God to man; day dreams, in which the hours unfold, beautiful and uncounted, like the leaves of the oleander flowers; nights, when 'the plighted hands are softly locked in sweet unsevered sleep;' gay laughter here and there, glad charity with all things; meditation now and then to deepen the wellsprings of the mind; the open air always; limbs bathed in the warmth as in a summer sea; opal skies of evening watched with fancies of the poets; and everywhere perpetual sense of a delicious rest, and of desire and of hope crowned to fruition; this was the life for Fiordelisa.

And he knew it.

And he instead abode in this: fierce wrangle, lowest aims; shrewd watchfulness for gain, perpetual chatter of art as means of loss and profit; hard tyranny and sated possession that dressed themselves as passion, and made dupes one of