hat cover absence must look like white
flowers in the green fields of earth, or like doves hovering: and he
reaches down and strokes them with his warm beams, making all their
feathers like gold.

Some clouds let the gold come through; _mine_, now.--That cloud I saw
away to the right is coming this way toward me. I can see the shadow of
it now, moving along a far-off strip of road: and I wonder if it is
_your_ cloud, with you under it coming to see me again!

When you come, why am I any happier than when I know you are coming? It
is the same thing in love. I have you now all in my mind's eye; I have
you by heart; have I my arms a bit more round you then than now?

How it puzzles me that, when love is perfect, there should be
disappearances and reappearances: and faces now and then showing a
change!--You, actually, the last time you came, looking a day older than
the day before! What was it? Had old age blown you a kiss, or given you a
wrinkle in the art of dying? Or had you turned over some new leaf, and
found it withered on the other side?

I could not see how it was: I heard you coming--it was spring! The door
opened:--oh, it was autumnal! One day had fallen away like a leaf out of
my forest, and I had not been there to see it go!

At what hour of the twenty-four does a day shed itself out of our lives?
Not, I think, on the stroke of the clock, at midnight, or at cock-crow.
Some people, perhaps, would say--with the first sleep; and that the
"beauty-sleep" is the new day putting out its green wings. _I_ think it
must be not till something happens to make the new day a stronger
impression than the last. So it would please me to think that your
yesterday dropped off as you opened the door; and that, had I peeped and
seen you coming up the stairs, I should have seen you looking a day
younger.

_That_ means that you age at the sight of me! I think you do. I, I feel
a hundred on the road to immortality, directly your face dawns on me.

There's a foot gone over my grave! The angel of the resurrection with his
mouth pursed fast to his trumpet!--Nothing else than the gallop-a-gallop
of your horse:--it sounds like a kettle boiling over!

So this goes into hiding: listens to us all the while we talk; and comes
out afterwards with all its blushes stale, to be rouged up again and
sent off the moment your back is turned. No, better!--to be slipped into
your pocket and carried home to yourself _by_ yourself. How, when you
g