’Dear Heart, what thing may symbolise for us
    A love like ours; what gift, whate’er it be,
    Hold more significance ’twixt thee and me
  Than paltry words a truth miraculous,
  Or the poor signs that in astronomy
    Tell giant splendours in their gleaming might? 
    Yet love would still give such, as in delight
  To mock their impotence—­so this for thee.

    ’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. 
  Ah, my love shall fare as a banner in the hand of thy renown,
  In the arms of thy fame accomplished shall it lie when we lay us adown. 
  O deathless fame of Sigurd!  O glory of my lord! 
  O birth of the happy Brynhild to the measureless reward!”
  So they sat as the day grew dimmer, and they looked on days to come,
  And the fair tale speeding onward, and the glories of their home;
  And they saw their crowned children and the kindred of the kings,
  And deeds in the world arising and the day of better things: 
  All the earthly exaltation, till their pomp of life should be passed,
  And soft on the bosom of God their love should be laid at the last.’

And on the page facing this lies a pressed flower—­there used to be two—­guarded by these tender rhymes:—­

    ’Whoe’er shall read this mighty song
    In some forthcoming evensong,
    We pray thee guard these simple flowers,
    For, gentle Reader, they are “ours."’