Louis de Rippie

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VIII. LADY BRANDON. The thorough-going radical dips his gen in a mixture of wormwood and gall when he would give to the world what he calls a fair description of the English aristocracy, but it is only a miserable caricature. Far beneath' the surface his jaundiced eye has not gazed upon, lies a...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VIII. LADY BRANDON. The thorough-going radical dips his gen in a mixture of wormwood and gall when he would give to the world what he calls a fair description of the English aristocracy, but it is only a miserable caricature. Far beneath' the surface his jaundiced eye has not gazed upon, lies a something too sacred for his pen, something his imagination may never clothe in words. As is sometimes the case, after a long winter, spring, like a young giant, bursts forth in all his jubilant glory, waking, by his magical touch, the brown branches and stems to their green life. It is like the sudden step from boyhood to manly beauty, the throwing off of all restraint, the beginning to run a race which black frosts may check, which sudden storms may hinder, which tempests, and darkness, and harsh winds may impede. The tiny river Lye rippled and crept over its way through Lord Brandon's grounds; its bed is so small that it has no room to dash and rush in headlong speed to the never-satisfied sea; it is too far inland to hear the constant cry of Come, come, which that hoary-maned tyrant is ever sending to the broad, clear streams, that stumble, and leap, and lash themselves against the huge boulders that lie confusedly heaped in their deep beds, in their mad haste to engulph themselves in brine The Lye bore upon its bosom no mountain breeze; no heathery tinge was reflected back from its surface; the daisy only mirrored itself there, the scent of early violets only were wafted along with its flow. Eustic bridges here and there spanned it, the moor-hen peeped up from her nest amid the reeds, and a few fish snatched their evening meal from the stray flies that were sailing in the first glad gush of their tiny lives, unconscious of the enemy beneath them, whose litt...