Sights from a Steeple (From "Twice Told Tales")Hawthorne, Nathaniel
General
Sights from a Steeple (From "Twice Told Tales")
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Historical fiction, American; New England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories
to his well-fashioned habiliments, till he catches a backward glance of
mirth from a bright eye, and turns away with whatever comfort it conveys.
The old man and his daughters are safely housed, and now the storm lets
loose its fury. In every dwelling I perceive the faces of the
chambermaids as they shut down the windows, excluding the impetuous
shower, and shrinking away from the quick fiery glare. The large drops
descend with force upon the slated roofs, and rise again in smoke. There
is a rush and roar, as of a river through the air, and muddy streams
bubble majestically along the pavement, whirl their dusky foam into the
kennel, and disappear beneath iron grates. Thus did Arethusa sink. I
love not my station here aloft, in the midst of the tumult which I am
powerless to direct or quell, with the blue lightning wrinkling on my
brow, and the thunder muttering its first awful syllables in my ear. I
will descend. Yet let me give another glance to the sea, where the foam
breaks out in long white lines upon a broad expanse of blackness, or
boils up in far distant points, like snowy mountain-tops in the eddies of
a flood; and let me look once more at the green plain, and little hills
of the country, over which the giant of the storm is striding in robes of
mist, and at the town, whose obscured and desolate streets might beseem a
city of the dead; and turning a single moment to the sky, now gloomy as
an author's prospects, I prepare to resume my station on lower earth.
But stay! A little speck of azure has widened in the western heavens;
the sunbeams find a passage, and go rejoicing through the tempest; and on
yonder darkest cloud, born, like hallowed hopes, of the glory of another
world, and the trouble and tears of this, brightens forth the Rainbow!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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