specimens of Raffaele ware and Venetian glass—the
precious trifles, in short, which the collector of
mediaeval curiosities amasses for his heirs to disperse
amongst the palaces of kings and the cabinets of nations—were
dragged again to unfamiliar light. The invaded
sepulchral building seemed a very Pompeii of the Cinque
Cento. To examine, arrange, methodise, select
for national purposes, such miscellaneous treasures
would be the work of weeks. For easier access,
Darrell caused a slight hasty passage to be thrown
over the gap between the two edifices. It ran
from the room nicked into the gables of the old house,
which, originally fitted up for scientific studies,
now became his habitual apartment, into the largest
of the uncompleted chambers which had been designed
for the grand reception-gallery of the new building.
Into the pompous gallery thus made contiguous to his
monk-like cell, he gradually gathered the choicest
specimens of his collection. The damps were
expelled by fires on grateless hearthstones; sunshine
admitted from windows now for the first time exchanging
boards for glass; rough iron sconces, made at the
nearest forge, were thrust into the walls, and sometimes
lighted at night-Darrell and Fairthorn walking arm-in-arm
along the unpolished floors, in company with Holbein’s
Nobles, Perugino’s Virgins. Some of that
highbred company displaced and banished the next day,
as repeated inspection made the taste more rigidly
exclusive. Darrell had found object, amusement,
occupation—frivolous if Compared with those
lenses, and glasses, and algebraical scrawls which
had once whiled lonely hours in the attic-room hard
by; but not frivolous even to the judgment of the
austerest sage, if that sage had not reasoned away
his heart. For here it was not Darrell’s
taste that was delighted; it was Darrell’s heart
that, ever hungry, had found food. His heart
was connecting those long-neglected memorials of an
ambition baffled and relinquished—here
with a nation, there with his father’s grave!
How his eyes sparkled! how his lip smiled!
Nobody would have guessed it—none of us
know each other; least of all do we know the interior
being of those whom we estimate by public repute;—but
what a world of simple, fond affection lay coiled
and wasted in that proud man’s solitary breast!
The learned
compute that seven hundred and
seven millions of
millions of vibrations
have penetrated the eye before the eye can
distinguish the tints
of A Violet. What philosophy can calculate
the vibrations of the
heart before it can distinguish the colours of
love?
While Guy Darrell thus passed his hours within the
unfinished fragments of a dwelling builded for posterity,
and amongst the still relics of remote generations,
Love and Youth were weaving their warm eternal idyll
on the sunny lawns by the gliding river.
