Explore "The Pot of Basil" by Bernard Capes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
And so we reach a situation which, having no least authority to complicate itself, must suffice us in its simplicity to the end. It is a situation as old as the human drama; it has formed the groundwork for a thousand tales of passion and infidelity, more fierce, more involved than this that I relate; it embraces for its essentials but three characters, the lady, and the diffident lover, and the false friend. Yet, although our version may not rank in poignancy with the tragedy of the Rimini, or in homeliness with the courtship of Miles Standish, it can claim for its main details that virtue of truth which ennobles even little calamities above the finest ecstacies of the imagination.
It is into a brief idyll of love and summer, then, that we are now to penetrate. Would it might begin and end there in the green gardens -- to flow, in Tennyson's words: