“He took no further heed of me whatever,—­I doubt if he was even aware of my presence.  Wearily he laid his head back upon the white pillows I had placed in the armchair behind him, folded his hands together, and kept his eyes fixed steadfastly, and—­I thought—­even reverently, upon the setting sun that was now fast sinking like a globe of fire, towards the blue ridge of the Malvern hills, and my heart beat violently as I saw it touch the topmost peak.  While I watched, there broke suddenly forth from between the low lines of sunset cloud, a long ray of golden light, that fell full on the uplifted face of the little old man.  He did not turn his head, or shrink from its intense brightness, but his lips moved, though the utterance of the words he spoke was so broken and indistinct, that I stooped to hear them.

“’Adelais,—­O my lost darling,—­my Adelais,—­let me come to thee and be beloved at last!’

" Then I looked again at the western sky, and saw that the sun had gone down.”

Next morning I gathered my June roses and sweet jasmin, and took them over to the house of the little old man.  I went upstairs into the darkened chamber where they had laid him, and bestowed the flowers reverently about the white-draped bed.  All the wrinkles were wiped out of his pallid face now, and he looked so wondrously calm and peaceful, lying there with his closed eyelids and crossed hands, in the unbroken silence of the room, that the tears of pity I thought I should have wept at the sight never rose in my eyes; but instead, as I turned away, there came to my memory certain closing lines of a most beautiful poem, written not very long ago by a master-hand that surely held God’s commission to write.  It is a dead hand now, but the written words remain, and the singer herself has gone to the land of the Hereafter, where the souls of the poets float for ever in the full light of their recovered Godhead, singing such songs as mortal ear hath not yet heard, nor mortal heart conceived of.  And the poem of which I spoke, has this ending:—­

        “`Jasper first,’ I said,
        `And second, sapphire; third, chalcedony. 
        The rest in order,—­last, an amethyst."’

VII.  The Nightshade

        “But silence is most noble till the end.”—­Atalanta in Calydon.

Chapter I.

Somebody, the other day, presented me with a bunch of crimson roses and purple nightshade, tied together.

Roses and nightshade!

I thought the combination worthy of a poem!

For the rose, as all the world conceives, is the emblem of love; and the nightshade typifies silence.

I put my posy in a little vase filled with water, and when night came, I lay down to rest, with my head full of vague rhymes and unfledged ideas, whose theme was still my eccentric nosegay.  Sleep, however, overtook the muse, and the soft divinities of darkness, weaving their tender spells about me, dissolved my contemplated sonnet into a dream.