noon
Woeful was the uncertainty which they felt in discriminating between the natural bloom of youth and the beauty of that fatal malady which they dreaded . His tall slender frame , his transparent cheek , so touching , so unearthly in the fairness of its expression ; the delicacy of his whole organization , both mental and physical -- all , all , with the terror of decline in their hearts , spoke as much of despair as of hope , and placed the life and death of their beloved boy in an equal poise . But , independently of his extraordinary personal advantages , all his dispositions were so gentle and affectionate , that it was not I in human nature to entertain harsh feeling toward him . Although modest and shrinking , even to diffidence , he possessed a mind full of intellect and enthusiasm : his imagination , too , overflowed with creative power , and sought the dreamy solitudes of noon , that it might , far from the bustle of life , shadow forth those images of beauty which come thickly only upon those whose hearts are most susceptible of its forms . Many a time has he sat alone upon the brow of a rock or hill , watching the clouds of heaven , or gazing on the setting sun , or communing with the thousand aspects of nature in a thousand moods , his young spirit relaxed into that elysian reverie which , beyond all other kinds of intellectual enjoyment , is the most seductive to a youth of poetic temperament . There were , indeed , in Osborne 's case , too many of those light and scarcely perceptible tokens which might be traced , if not to a habit of decline , at least to a more than ordinary delicacy of constitution . The short cough , produced by the slightest damp , or the least breath of ungenial air -- the varying cheek , now rich as purple , and again pale as a star of heaven -- the unsteady pulse , and the nervous sense of uneasiness without a cause -- all these might be symptoms of incipient decay , or proofs of those fine impulses which are generally associated with quick sensibility and genius .