'This book for thee; our sweetest honeycomb
Of lovesome thought and passion-hearted rhyme,
Builded of gold, and kisses, and desire,
By that wild poet whom so many a time
Our hungering lips have blessed, until a fire
Burnt speech up, and the wordless hour had come.'
'Meredith's _Richard Feverel_, 6/-, less dis., 4/6.'
Narcissus was never weary of reading those two wonderful chapters where
Lucy and Richard meet, and he used to say that some day he would beg
leave from Mr. Meredith to reprint at his own charges just those two
chapters, to distribute to all true lovers in the kingdom. It would be
hard to say how often he and his maid had read them aloud together, with
amorous punctuation--caresses for commas, and kisses for full-stops.
'Morris' _Sigurd the Volsung_, 12/-, less dis., 9/-.'
This book they loved when their love had grown to have more of earnest
purpose in it, and its first hysteric ecstasy had passed into the more
solemn ardours of the love that goes not with spring, but loves even
unto the winter and beyond. It is marked all through in pencil by
Narcissus; but on one page, where it opens easily, there are written
initials, in a woman's hand, against this great passage:--
'She said: "Thou shalt never unsay it, and thy heart is mine indeed:
Thou shalt bear thy love in thy bosom as thou helpest the earth-folk's
need:
Thou shalt wake to it dawning by dawning; thou shalt sleep and it shall
not be strange:
There is none shall thrust between us till our earthly lives shall
change.
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