Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 20, August 1877Various
History
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 20, August 1877
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
At last they glided once more through the stony jaws of the harbor, as if
returning again to the earth from a sojourn in the land of the
disembodied. When Clementina's foot touched the shore she felt like one
waked out of a dream, from whom yet the dream has not departed, but keeps
floating about him, waved in thinner and yet thinner streams from the
wings of the vanishing sleep. It seemed almost as if her spirit, instead
of having come back to the world of its former abode, had been borne
across the parting waters and landed on the shore of the immortals. There
was the ghostlike harbor of the spirit-land, the water gleaming betwixt
its dark walls, one solitary boat motionless upon it, the men moving about
like shadows in the star twilight. Here stood three women and a man on the
shore, and save the stars no light shone, and from the land came no sound
of life. Was it the dead of the night or a day that had no sun? It was not
dark, but the light was rayless. Or rather it was as if she had gained
the power of seeing in the dark. Suppressed sleep wove the stuff of a
dream around her, and the stir at her heart kept it alive with
dream-forms. Even the voice of Peter's Annie, saying, "I s' bide for my
man.--Gude-nicht, my leddy," did not break the charm. Her heart shaped
that also into the dream. Turning away with Malcolm and Lizzy, she passed
along the front of the Seaton. How still, how dead, how empty like
cenotaphs, all the cottages looked! How the sea, which lay like a watcher
at their doors, murmured in its sleep! Arrived at the entrance to her own
close, Lizzy next bade them good-night, and Clementina and Malcolm were
left.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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