There Was No Stir Of Weather
Overhead, No Sound Of Rural Labour, No Sign Of Life In The Land;
But All The Earth Was Dead And Still, As Though It Had Lain For
Thrice A Thousand Years Under The Leaden Gloom Of One Unbroken
Sabbath.
Softly and sadly the poor, dumb, patient stream went winding and
winding along through its shifting pathway; in some places its
waters were parted, and then again, lower down, they would meet
once more.
I could see that the stream from year to year was
finding itself new channels, and flowed no longer in its ancient
track, but I knew that the springs which fed it were high on Ida -
the springs of Simois and Scamander!
It was coldly and thanklessly, and with vacant, unsatisfied eyes
that I watched the slow coming and the gliding away of the waters.
I tell myself now, as a profane fact, that I did stand by that
river (Methley gathered some seeds from the bushes that grew
there), but since that I am away from his banks, "divine Scamander"
has recovered the proper mystery belonging to him as an unseen
deity; a kind of indistinctness, like that which belongs to far
antiquity, has spread itself over my memory, of the winding stream
that I saw with these very eyes. One's mind regains in absence
that dominion over earthly things which has been shaken by their
rude contact. You force yourself hardily into the material
presence of a mountain, or a river, whose name belongs to poetry
and ancient religion, rather than to the external world; your
feelings wound up and kept ready for some sort of half-expected
rapture are chilled, and borne down for the time under all this
load of real earth and water; but let these once pass out of sight,
and then again the old fanciful notions are restored, and the mere
realities which you have just been looking at are thrown back so
far into distance, that the very event of your intrusion upon such
scenes begins to look dim and uncertain, as though it belonged to
mythology.
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