First Sentence

"NEARLY six months had gone since that wintry parting, when the lovers clasped hands and blessed each other under the sign of Aries; and now it was midsummer, and all the fields were green, and the limes were breaking into blossom, and the hawthornflower was dead, and the last of the blue-bells had faded, and all the white orchard-blooms, the tender loveliness of spring, belonged to the past; for the beauty of earth and nature is a thing of perpetual change, so closely allied with death that in every rapture there is the beginning of a regret."