Love stories; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Scotland -- Fiction
So sung, a century before, a poet of that sweet cult of the school
centred in the very area in which she moved; and if his thoughts were
true there was a true act of worship that sunny afternoon on the
rising hills beyond the lakehead. For happiness is not merely to be at
rest. It is to be with God, to carry out to the full His wish that His
children should appreciate and enjoy the powers and good things given
them by His hands. And when that happiness is based on love--and there
is no true happiness on aught that is not high--the love itself is of
the soul and quivers with the flapping of its wings. Then indeed can
we realize that marvellous promise of the words of the Master:
“Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.” Wordsworth and
those who held with him saw God and worshipped Him in those myriad
beauties of the lake they loved; and as the beauty and its immortal
truth soothed and purified their souls, so was the spirit of the
love-sick girl cleansed of all dross. How at such a time, when the
soul swam free in grateful worship, was there place for anything that
was not clean? Her father thought, as he looked at her and heard the
ring of her voice, that he had never seen her look better or happier.
She was full of spirits, gay, sweet, tender; and yet there was over
her such a grace of gentle gravity that the old man felt himself
saying to himself:
“My little girl is a woman!”
That mellow afternoon was to her lovely; the trees and shrubs, the
flowers, the fields. The singing of the birds was ethereal music; the
lights and shadows were the personal manifestation of Nature’s God.
Her heart, her sympathy, her nature were at full tide; all overflowing
and in their plenitude full.
The long summer afternoon faded into the softness of twilight during
the homeward journey. Perhaps it was the yielding to its mysterious
influence which made Joy so still; perhaps it was that she was drawing
nearer to the man whom she adored. Her father neither knew nor took
note of it. He saw that his little girl was silent in an ecstasy of
happiness in that soft twilight of which she had spoken so tenderly;
and he was content. He too sat silent, yielding himself to the
influence of the beauty around him.
When they reached the hotel Joy seemed to wake from a dream; but she
lost none of her present placidity, none of her content. One form of
happiness had given way to another, that was all. As she stood on the
steps, waiting whilst her father was giving the coachman his
instructions for the morrow, she tried to peer into the lilac bushes
in the garden. She had a sort of intuition--nay more that an
intuition, an actual certainty--that He was again behind them. And
once more she so stood and moved that he might see her face as he
would. When her father turned to come in she took his arm and pointed
to the sky:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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