Carefully Had This Scrap Been Preserved
By The Good Curator; His Piety Touched And Delighted Me.
I could have desired no happier incident for the close of my
journey; by lucky chance this visit to
The museum had been postponed
till the last morning, and, as I idled through the afternoon about
the Via Plutino, my farewell mood was in full harmony with that in
which I had landed from Naples upon the Calabrian shore. So hard a
thing to catch and to retain, the mood corresponding perfectly to an
intellectual bias - hard, at all events, for him who cannot shape
his life as he will, and whom circumstance ever menaces with dreary
harassment. Alone and quiet, I heard the washing of the waves; I saw
the evening fall on cloud-wreathed Etna, the twinkling lights come
forth on Scylla and Charybdis; and, as I looked my last towards the
Ionian Sea, I wished it were mine to wander endlessly amid the
silence of the ancient world, to-day and all its sounds forgotten.
THE END.
End of By the Ionian Sea by George Gissing
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