the blue July heavens:
but Michael and Alan clad in white went careless of the heat. They
walked over the grass uphill and ran down through the cool dells of oak
trees, down towards the glassy ponds to play 'ducks and drakes' in the
flickering weather. They stood by the intersecting carriage-roads and
mocked the perspiring travellers in their black garments. They cared for
nothing but being alive in Richmond Park on a summer Saturday of London.
At last, near a shadowy woodland where the grasses grew very tall,
Michael and Alan, smothering the air with pollen, flung themselves down
into the fragrancy and, while the bees droned about them, slept in the
sun. Later in the afternoon the two friends sat on the Terrace among the
old ladies and the old gentlemen, and the nurserymaids and the
children's hoops. Down below, the Thames sparkled in a deep green
prospect of England. An hour went by; the old ladies and the old
gentlemen and the nurserymaids and the hoops faded away one by one under
the darkling trees. Down below, the Thames threaded with shining curves
a vast and elusive valley of azure. The Thames died away to a sheen of
dusky silver: the azure deepened almost to indigo: lights flitted into
ken one by one: there travelled up from the river a sound of singing,
and somewhere in the houses behind a piano began to tinkle. Michael
suddenly became aware that the end of the summer term was in sight. He
shivered in the dewfall and put his arm round Alan's neck affectionately
and intimately: only profound convention kept him from kissing his
friend and by not doing so he felt vaguely that something was absent
from this perfection of dusk. Something in Michael at that moment
demanded emotional expression, and from afternoon school of yesterday
recurred to his mind a note to some lines in the Sixth AEneid of Virgil.
He remembered the lines, having by some accident learned his repetition
for that day:

_Huc omnis turba ad ripas effusa ruebat,_
_Matres atque viri defunctaque corpora vita_
_Magnanimum heroum, pueri innuptoeque puelloe,_
_Impositique rogis juvenes ante ora parentum;_
_Quam multa in silvis auctumni frigore primo_
_Lapsa cadunt folia, aut ad terram gurgite ab alto_
_Quam multoe glomerantur aves ubi frigidus annus_
_Trans pontum fugat et terris immittit apricis._

Compare, said the commentator, Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I.

_Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks_