Page:Poems of Nature and Life.djvu/205

 THE RANDALL FAMILY 1 9/

The world is too much with us ; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers ; Little we see in Nature that is ours ; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon ! This sea that bares her bosom to the moon, The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are upgathered now like sleeping flowers. For this, for everything we are out of tune: It moves us not. Great God ! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn — So might I, standing on this pleasant lea. Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn. Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea. Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

There was to me an inexpressible charm in the mode of life pursued so many years in that quiet retreat. It was soothing and restful to get out of the noisy Boston, with its rush of business and roar of wheels and hurrying crowds all intent on momentous nothings, and slip into an atmos- phere of music, of books, of ideas and ideals that concerned the high permanent interests of human existence. The relation between the sister and the brother was beautiful in the extreme, not in the least disturbed by occasional nervous irritability on John's part, which never went beneath the surface or inflicted a sting. They knew each other too well for that. Each was devotedly fond of the other, she proud of his genius and noble personal aspect, he grateful for her untiring care, and humbly reverential of her instantaneous yet unerring moral intuitions. " Dear brother ! How handsome he is ! " said poor Belinda, as we stood together beside him on the evening after he had died ; and she stooped to kiss the marble brow, stroking tenderly the long white hair. " Belinda has not a great intellect," John said to me again and again from my boyhood down,

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