The Hours of Evening, XVI: How happy we are still

How happy we are still and proud of living when the least ray of sunshine glimpsed in the heavens lights up for a moment the poor flowers of rime that the hard and delicate frost engraved on our window-panes.

Rapture leaps in us and hope carries us away, and our old garden appears to us again, in spite of its long paths strewn with dead branches, living and pure and bright and full of golden gleams.

Something shining and undaunted, I know not what, creeps into our blood; and in the quick kisses that, ardently, frantically, we give each other, we re-embody the immensity and fulness of summer.