If any one of them could
only have burnt him up at that moment, I would have gone down to
the kitchen and fetched it myself.
"Surely you like this modest, trembling English twilight?" he said
softly. "Ah! I love it. I feel my inborn admiration of all that
is noble, and great, and good, purified by the breath of heaven on
an evening like this. Nature has such imperishable charms, such
inextinguishable tenderness for me!--I am an old, fat man--talk
which would become your lips, Miss Halcombe, sounds like a
derision and a mockery on mine. It is hard to be laughed at in my
moments of sentiment, as if my soul was like myself, old and
overgrown. Observe, dear lady, what a light is dying on the
trees! Does it penetrate your heart, as it penetrates mine?"
He paused, looked at me, and repeated the famous lines of Dante on
the Evening-time, with a melody and tenderness which added a charm
of their own to the matchless beauty of the poetry itself.
"Bah!" he cried suddenly, as the last cadence of those noble
Italian words died away on his lips; "I make an old fool of
myself, and only weary you all! Let us shut up the window in our
bosoms and get back to the matter-of-fact world. Percival! I
sanction the admission of the lamps.
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