And yet through all are those lowering lines which somehow he would insist on introducing in the wrong places with infinite pains! It was as if he took the trouble to help us up a high marble staircase to the cupola of a tower, and to throw open before our eyes a splendid landscape, only to trip us up when we are lost in wonder of it all, and send us headlong to the dead earth below.
It was when we were looking down a gorge of tropical splendour in the island of Dominica in the West Indies opening a wide mouth to the Caribbean, that the incomparable lines from _Enoch Arden_ came upon me in the flash of the crimson-and-blue wings of a bird--one of the many lories, I think it was--that fled about the wild masses of the brake of hibiscus, and I said them to Dorothy. Under our eyes was a tropical garden on each side of the valley--a riot of colour--a tropical sunset laid at our feet in the tints of a thousand flowers down to where the countless palms of the gorge began to mingle with the yuccas that swayed over the sea-cliffs in the blue distance.
"The league-long roller thundering on the reef,
The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd
And blossom'd in the zenith, or the sweep
As down the shore he ranged, or all day long
A shipwreck'd sailor, waiting for a sail.
Among the palms and ferns and precipices;
Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,
The scarlet shafts of sunrise--but no sail."
There was the most perfect picture of the tropical island.
Some months after we had returned to England I found the _Enoch Arden_ volume lying on the door at Dorothy's feet. She was roseate with indignation as I entered the room. I paused for an explanation.
It came. She touched the book with her foot--it was a symbolic spurn--as much as any one with a conscience could give to a royal-blue tooled morocco binding.
"Those two lines at the end. Listen to this"--she picked up the book with a sort of indignant snatch:--
"'There came so loud a calling of the sea
He woke, he rose, he spread his arms abroad
Crying with a loud voice, "A sail! a sail!
I am saved," and so fell back and spoke no more.
"Now tell me if I don't do well to be angary," cried Dorothy. "Those two lines--'a costlier funeral'! he should have given the items in the bill and said what was the name of the undertaker. Oh, why didn't you warn me off that awful conclusion? What should you say the bill came to? Oh, Alfred, Lord Tennyson!"