The Ordeal of Richard Feverel — Volume 2Meredith, George
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The Ordeal of Richard Feverel — Volume 2
Meredith, George
Domestic fiction; England -- Fiction; English fiction -- 19th century; 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 eve 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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