Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 2.djvu/153

 rough iron sconces, made at the nearest forge, were thrust into the walls, and sometimes lighted at night-Darrell and Fairthorn walking arm-in-arm along the unpolished floors, in company with Holbein's Nobles, Perugino's Virgins. Some of that highbred company displaced and banished the next day, as repeated inspection made the taste more rigidly exclusive. Darrell had found object, amusement, occupation--frivolous if Compared with those lenses, and glasses, and algebraical scrawls which had once whiled lonely hours in the attic-room hard by; but not frivolous even to the judgment of the austerest sage, if that sage had not reasoned away his heart. For here it was not Darrell's taste that was delighted; it was Darrell's heart that, ever hungry, had found food. His heart was connecting those long-neglected memorials of an ambition baffled and relinquished--here with a nation, there with his father's grave! How his eyes sparkled! how his lip smiled! Nobody would have guessed it--none of us know each other; least of all do we know the interior being of those whom we estimate by public repute;--but what a world of simple, fond affection lay coiled and wasted in that proud man's solitary breast!

CHAPTER II.

THE LEARNED COMPUTE THAT SEVEN HUNDRED AND SEVEN MILLIONS OF  MILLIONS OF VIBRATIONS HAVE PENETRATED THE EYE BEFORE THE EYE CAN DISTINGUISH THE TINTS OF A VIOLET. WHAT PHILOSOPHY CAN CALCULATE THE VIBRATIONS OF THE HEART BEFORE IT CAN DISTINGUISH THE COLOURS OF  LOVE?

While Guy Darrell thus passed his hours within the unfinished fragments of a dwelling builded for posterity, and amongst the still relics of remote generations, Love and Youth were weaving their warm eternal idyll on the sunny lawns by the gliding river.

There they are, Love and Youth, Lionel and Sophy, in the arbour round which her slight hands have twined the honeysuckle, fond imitation of that bower endeared by the memory of her earliest holiday--she seated coyly, he on the ground at her feet, as when Titania had watched his sleep. He has been reading to her, the book has fallen from his hand. What book? That volume of poems so unintelligibly obscure to all but the dreaming young, who are