"They breathe
Not of themselves, but thee!"
Strange, too, how all old enjoyments revive: things that I had thought gone by for ever, I read with almost my former eagerness; but I apply all I read to him. Ah! no moment is languid now; I have so much to remember; I retrace all he said, all he did; I imagine a thousand scenes in which we both take part.
Why is it that, in dreaming of an ideal future, I never lay the scene in London? I fancy to myself a lone and lovely island, far away in the southern seas, where never another step entered but our own; such an island as lives in Pope's delicious verse. How happy I could be in Calypso's cave, where
"Cedar and frankincense, an odorous pile,
Flamed on the hearth, and wide perfumed the isle.
Without the grot, a various sylvan scene
Appeared around, and grots of living green;
Poplars and alders ever quivering played,
And nodding cypress formed a fragrant shade,
On whose high branches, waving with the storm,
The birds of broadest wing their mansions form;
The chough, the sea-mew, and loquacious crow,
And scream aloft, and skim the deep below.
