The Ordeal of Richard Feverel: A History of a Father and SonMeredith, George
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The Ordeal of Richard Feverel: A History of a Father and Son
Meredith, George
Domestic fiction; England -- Fiction; Fathers and sons -- Fiction
The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the waters shout
to him golden shouts. He comes, and his heralds run before him, and
touch the leaves of oaks and planes and beeches lucid green, and the
pine-stems redder gold; leaving brightest footprints upon
thickly-weeded banks, where the foxglove's last upper-bells incline,
and bramble-shoots wander amid moist rich herbage. The plumes of the
woodland are alight; and beyond them, over the open, 'tis a race
with the long-thrown shadows; a race across the heaths and up the
hills, till, at the farthest bourne of mounted eastern cloud, the
heralds of the sun lay rosy fingers and rest.
Sweet are the shy recesses of the woodland. The ray treads softly
there. A film athwart the pathway quivers many-hued against purple
shade fragrant with warm pines, deep moss-beds, feathery ferns. The
little brown squirrel drops tail, and leaps; the inmost bird is
startled to a chance tuneless note. From silence into silence things
move.
Peeps of the revelling splendour above and around enliven the
conscious full heart within. The flaming West, the crimson heights,
shower their glories through voluminous leafage. But these are
bowers where deep bliss dwells, imperial joy, that owes no fealty to
yonder glories, in which the young lamb gambols and the spirits of
men are glad. Descend, great Radiance! embrace creation with
beneficent fire, and pass from us! You and the vice-regal light that
succeeds to you, and all heavenly pageants, are the ministers and
the slaves of the throbbing content within.
For this is the home of the enchantment. Here, secluded from vexed
shores, the prince and princess of the island meet: here like
darkling nightingales they sit, and into eyes and ears and hands
pour endless ever-fresh treasures of their souls.
Roll on, grinding wheels of the world: cries of ships going down in
a calm, groans of a System which will not know its rightful hour of
exultation, complain to the universe. You are not heard here.
He calls her by her name, Lucy: and she, blushing at her great
boldness, has called him by his, Richard. Those two names are the
key-notes of the wonderful harmonies the angels sing aloft.
"Lucy! my beloved!"
"O Richard!"
Out in the world there, on the skirts of the woodland, a sheep-boy
pipes to meditative eye on a penny-whistle.
Love's musical instrument is as old, and as poor: it has but two
stops; and yet, you see, the cunning musician does thus much with
it!
Other speech they have little; light foam playing upon waves of
feeling, and of feeling compact, that bursts only when the sweeping
volume is too wild, and is no more than their sigh of tenderness
spoken.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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