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Can the Elysian fields of Asphodel be more beautiful? Perhaps to others they might seem so; but not to me. My first glimpse of hope came to me in the woods at Abinger in a windless, sunny week at Easter. The gipsies gave me food once or twice. And I ate the scraps that the trippers left after their picnics at the top of Leith Hill where the tower is.
The asphodel is at least no falsifier, but a true lily by all the heaven-set marks, though small of flower and run mostly to leaves, and should have a name that gives it credit for growing up in such celestial semblance. Native to the mesa meadows is a pale iris, gardens of it acres wide, that in the spring season of full bloom make an airy fluttering as of azure wings.
Their stalks are long, and the flowers 'nod' upon them, so that I see how the Greeks could make them into chaplets how Lycidas wore his crown of white violets lying by the fireside elbow-deep in withered asphodel, watching the chestnuts in the embers, and softly drinking deep healths to Ageanax far off upon the waves. It is impossible to go wrong in these valleys.
As to the victims, you must surely see for yourselves that all the solid nutriment is whisked away heavenwards in the form of smoke, leaving us Shades precisely as we were; the residue, being dust, is useless; or is it your theory that Shades batten on ashes? Pluto's realm is not so barren, nor asphodel so scarce with us, that we must apply to you for provisions.
The angels must have helped you;" and holding up the poor crushed asphodels, she went on: "As soon as I came to myself, I saw the asphodels in my hand, and I said, 'Asphodel for burial; and tried to throw them away, so that if Robert came he would not find me dead with them in my hand, for only yesterday he said to me, 'Please never pick an asphodel I can't bear to see you touch one."
A faint breath of the mysteriously perfumed air stirred the exotic palms over her head and made their fronds rub against each other gratingly, as if some secret signal were being carried on from one to another. Turning to right, to left, or to look behind her, dimly seen mountains soared toward a sky that deepened from asphodel to the dark indigo of a star-powdered zenith.
Reynard is making for Coombes's Wood, but the earths were all stopped this morning at four o'clock; so away he speeds again, leaving the rectory and its lovely meadows and the dear old church below us away past the bogs where the cotton-grass and the flycatcher, the blue gentian and the yellow asphodel, grow among the treacherous tussocks away to Eversley Wood.
In order to counteract the uncanny feeling likely to be aroused by this unbidden guest, Alcibiades had placed an onion between its front teeth, and in one of its hands an asphodel lily, which the skeleton appeared to smell at. When the silence at last became oppressive, Pericles roused himself from his lethargy, and opened the conversation.
Above the asphodel fields the mountains climb in rocky slopes to solitudes of stone and sunlight that curve round and join that wall of cliffs in one common skyline.
And after we had sacked the lofty towers of Troy he received a goodly portion of the spoil, and a special prize of honour, and so departed, untouched by point or blade, to his father's house." When he heard these brave tidings of his son, Achilles rejoiced in spirit, and strode with lofty gait along the plain of asphodel.
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