Doctor Bairam would hardly be flattered at such a comparison, assuredly, he interjected.

“Besides,” added the baronet, “the French make no pretences, and thereby escape one of the main penalties of hypocrisy.  Whereas we!—­but I am not their advocate, credit me.  It is better, perhaps, to pay our homage to virtue.  At least it delays the spread of entire corruptness.”

Doctor Bairam wished the baronet success, and diligently endeavoured to assist his search for a mate worthy of the pure-blood barb, by 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.