294 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN 



young woman, of five-and-twenty or so, clothed in bright 

 red, rushes with her face towards you through a wood, 

 with outstretched arms, her face glowing with love and 

 devotion, and her Ups parted; behind her are great 

 banks of cumuli, sanguine-stained from the setting sun, 

 and the stems of the trees glow with the same light. 

 Pure, small, white wood-flowers grow about her feet. All 

 this to represent the joy and the pride of Ufe, which she 

 willingly leaves to join her leper husband, who stands in 

 the dark shadow of his humble hut, clothed from h^ad to 

 foot ia grey leper draperies, sUghtly recalling Mr. Watts's 

 own beautiful figure of ' Love and Death ' — the head 

 turned away, and the hand upheld forbidding her 

 approach, unable to appreciate the love she brings him, 

 or loving her too well to allow of any risk for her sake, 

 though she cries : ' Kiss me, in the name of the everlasting 

 God ! I wiU live and die with you ! ' The sacrifice 

 could bring him no joy ; and so it wiU ever be, not only 

 to the leper — for the love of men is not as the love of 

 women. 



It seems impossible anyone should share our ignor- 

 ance, so I wiU merely state that as the two old friends, 

 who had led such different hves, stood entranced before 

 the picture, we neither of us knew it was the illustration 

 of a poem called ' Happy, or The Leper's Bride,' in 

 Tennyson's last volume, 'Demeter and Other Poems.' 

 He gives in a note an interesting account of the decision 

 of the Church, in the twelfth century, that marriage was 

 indissoluble, and that the lepers' wives might rejoin their 

 husbands if they Hked. 



Once more overcome with fatigue, we sat down on 

 a bench, to rest before leaving, when a wonderful little 

 maiden passed, cleanly but very poorly dressed for these 

 days, with beautifully and yet fashionably dressed hair, and 

 far-away dreamy eyes. ' That, no doubt, is a young artist 



