Have I not said that I defy
time, and shall space hope to daunt me? I keep books by day, but by
night books keep me. They leave me to dreams and reveries. Shall I
confess, that sometimes when I have been sitting, reading to my Prue,
Cymbeline, perhaps, or a Canterbury tale, I have seemed to see clearly
before me the broad highway to my castles in Spain; and as she looked
up from her work, and smiled in sympathy, I have even fancied that I
was already there.
SEA FROM SHORE
"Come unto these yellow sands."
_The Tempest._
"Argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales."
_Tennyson_
In the month of June, Prue and I like to walk upon the Battery toward
sunset, and watch the steamers, crowded with passengers, bound for the
pleasant places along the coast where people pass the hot months.
Sea-side lodgings are not very comfortable, I am told; but who would
not be a little pinched in his chamber, if his windows looked upon the
sea?
In such praises of the ocean do I indulge at such times, and so
respectfully do I regard the sailors who may chance to pass, that Prue
often says, with her shrewd smiles, that my mind is a kind of
Greenwich Hospital, full of abortive marine hopes and wishes,
broken-legged intentions, blind regrets, and desires, whose hands have
been shot away in some hard battle of experience, so that they cannot
grasp the results towards which they reach.
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