The priest gazed at her with looks of parental affection, and said,
and more precious to the receiver, than the richest donation that ever decked the shrine of Loretto. How fragrant it is!” he added, presenting it to me.
I took it in silence, but raised it no higher than my lip--the eye of Glorvina met mine, as my kiss breathed upon her flower: Good God! what an undefinable, what a delicious emotion thrilled through my heart at that moment! and the next--yet I know not how it was, or whether the motion was made by her, or by me, or by the priest--but somehow, Glorvina had got between us, and while I gazed at her beautiful flower, I personified the blossom, and addressed to her the happiest lines that form “_La Guirlande de Julie_” while, as I repeated.
“Mais si sur votre front je peux briller un jour,
La plus humble des fleurs sera la plus superbe
I reposed it for a moment on her brow in passing it over to the priest.
“Oh!” said she, with an arch smile, “I perceive you too will expect a tributary flower for these charming lines; and the summer’s first rose”--she paused abruptly; but her eloquent eye continued, “should be thine, but that thou mayst be far from hence when the summer’s first rose appears.” I thought too--but it might be only the fancy of my wishes, that a sigh floated on the lip, when recollection checked the effusion of the heart.
“The _rose_,” (said the priest, with simplicity, and more engaged with the classicality of the idea, than the inference to be drawn from it,) “the rose is the flower of Love.”
I stole a look at Glorvina, whose cheek now emulated the tint of the theme of our conversation; and plucking a thistle that sprung from a broken pediment, she blew away its down with her balmy breath, merely to hide her confusion.
Surely she is the most sentient of all created beings!
“I remember,” continued the priest, “being severely censured by a rigid old priest, at my college in St. Omer’s, who found me reading the Idylium of Ausonius, in which he so beautifully celebrates the rose, when the good father believed me deep in St. Augustin.”
“The rose,” said I, “has always been the poet’s darling theme. The impassioned lyre of Sappho has breathed upon its leaves. Anacreon has wooed it in the happiest effusions of his genius; and poesy seems to have exhausted her powers in celebrating the charms of the most beautiful and transient of flowers.