Miseram me omnia terrent, et maris sonitus, et scopuli, et solitudo,
et sanctitudo Apollinis.
LATIN PLAY.
“Many days elapsed before the stranger revisited the isle. How he was
occupied, or what feelings agitated him in the interval, it would be
beyond human conjecture to discover. Perhaps he sometimes exulted in the
misery he had inflicted,--perhaps he sometimes pitied it. His stormy
mind was like an ocean that had swallowed a thousand wrecks of gallant
ships, and now seemed to dally with the loss of a little slender skiff,
that could hardly make way on its surface in the profoundest calm.
Impelled, however, by malignity, or tenderness, or curiosity, or
weariness of artificial life, so vividly contrasted by the unadulterated
existence of Immalee, into whose pure elements nothing but flowers and
fragrance, the sparkling of the heavens, and the odours of earth, had
transfused their essence--or, possibly, by a motive more powerful than
all,--_his own will_; which, never analysed, and hardly ever confessed
to be the ruling principle of our actions, governs nine-tenths of
them.--He returned to the shore of the haunted isle, the name by which
it was distinguished by those who knew not how to classify the new
goddess who was supposed to inhabit it, and who were as much puzzled by
this new specimen in their theology, as Linnæus himself could have been
by a non-descript in botany. Alas! the varieties in moral botany far
exceed the wildest anomalies of those in the natural. However it was,
the stranger returned to the isle. But he had to traverse many paths,
where human foot but his had never been, and to rend away branches that
seemed to tremble at a human touch, and to cross streams into which no
foot but his had ever been dipped, before he could discover where
Immalee had concealed herself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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