Page:The Gift, a Christmas and New Year's Present for 1842.djvu/166

156 not at all, but lay in a motionless content, each in its own old station, shining on gloriously for ever.

And the margin of the river, and of the many dazzling rivulets that glided through devious ways into its channel, and the spaces that extended from the brinks away down into the depths of the streams, until they reached the bed of pebbles at the bottom—these spots, not less than the whole surface of the valley, from the river to the mountains that girdled it in, were carpeted all by a soft green grass, thick, short, perfectly even, and vanilla-perfumed, but so besprinkled throughout with the yellow buttercup, the white daisy, the purple violet, and the ruby-red asphodel, that its exceeding beauty spoke to our hearts in loud tones of the love and of the glory of God.

And here and there, in groves about this grass, like wildernesses of dreams, sprang up fantastic trees, whose tall slender stems stood not upright, but slanted gracefully toward the light that peered at noonday into the centre of the valley. Their bark was speckled with the vivid alternate splendours of ebony and silver, and was smoother than all save the cheeks of Eleonora—so that but for the brilliant green of the huge leaves that spread from their summits in long tremulous lines, dallying with the zephyrs, one might have fancied them giant serpents of Syria, doing homage to their sovereign, the sun.

Hand in hand about this valley, for fifteen years, roamed I with Eleonora, before love entered within our hearts. It was one evening at the close of the third lustrum of her life, and of the fourth of my own, that we sat, locked in each other's embrace, beneath the serpent-like trees, and looked down within the waters of the River of Silence at our images therein. We spoke no words during the rest of that sweet day; and our words upon the morrow were tremulous and few.