Page:A Room of One's Own (Hogarth 1929).djvu/23

---

ingly. And as it went on I set it against the background of that other talk, and as I matched the two together I had no doubt that one was the descendant, the legitimate heir of the other. Nothing was changed; nothing was different save only—here I listened with all my ears not entirely to what was being said, but to the murmur or current behind it. Yes, that was it—the change was there. Before the war at a luncheon party like this people would have said precisely the same things but they would have sounded different, because in those days they were accompanied by a sort of humming noise, not articulate, but musical, exciting, which changed the value of the words themselves. Could one set that humming noise to words? Perhaps with the help of the poets one could. A book lay beside me and, opening it, I turned casually enough to Tennyson. And here I found Tennyson was singing:

There has fallen a splendid tear From the passion-flower at the gate.She is coming, my dove, my dear; She is coming, my life, my fate;The red rose cries, "She is near, she is near"; And the white rose weeps, "She is late";The larkspur listens, "I hear, I hear"; And the lily whispers, "I wait."