Yet within that sandy barrier what wild and wondrous acts might be doing, and to be done! My mind, with a pinion that no sorrow or bondage could tame, passed over the desert, and saw the battle, the siege, the bloody sedition, the long and heart-broken banishment, the fierce conflict of passions irrestrainable as the tempest, the melancholy ruin of my country by a judgment powerful as fate, and dreary and returnless as the grave! But the waters between me and that shore were an obstacle that no vigor of imagination could overcome. I was too feeble to attempt the passage by swimming. The opposite coast appeared to be uninhabited, and the few fishing-boats that passed lazily along this lifeless coast evidently shunned the island, as I conceived, from some hidden shoal. I felt myself a prisoner, and the thought irritated me. That ancient disturbance of my mind, which rendered it so keenly excitable, was born again; I felt its coming, and knew that my only resource was to escape from this circumscribing paradise that had become my dungeon. Day after day I paced the shore, awaking the echoes with my useless shouts, as each distant sail glided along close to the sandy line that was now to me the unattainable path of happiness. I made signals from the hill, but I might as well have summoned the vultures to stop as they flew screaming above my head to feed on the relics of the Syrian caravans. What trifles can sometimes stand between man and enjoyment! Wisdom would have thanked Heaven for the hope of escaping the miseries of life in the little enchanted round, guarded by that entrenchment of waters, filled with every production that could delight the sense, and giving to the spirit, weary of all that the world could offer, the gentle retirement in which it could gather its remaining strength and make its peace with Heaven. I was lying during a fiery noon on the edge of the island, looking toward the opposite coast, the only object on which I could now bear to look, when, in the stillness of the hour, I heard a strange mingling of distant sounds, yet so totally indistinct that, after long listening, I could conjecture it to be nothing but the rising of the surge. It died away. But it haunted me: I heard it in fancy. It followed me in the morn, the noon, and the twilight; in the hour of toil and in the hour when earth and heaven were soft and silent as an infant’s sleep—when the very spirit of tranquillity seemed to be folding his dewy wings over the world.