y putting
several mamas, whom he visited, on the alert.

CHAPTER XIX

Away with Systems! Away with a corrupt World! Let us breathe the air of
the Enchanted Island.

Golden lie the meadows: golden run the streams; red gold is on the
pine-stems. The sun is coming down to earth, and walks the fields and the
waters.

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 ke