I Wished To Avail Myself Of My Vicinity To The Sea
And Bathe; But It Was Not Possible Near The Town; There Was No
Convenience.
The young woman whom I mentioned to you proposed
rowing me across the water amongst the rocks; but as she was
pregnant, I insisted on taking one of the oars, and learning to row.
It was not difficult, and I do not know a pleasanter exercise.
I
soon became expert, and my train of thinking kept time, as it were,
with the oars, or I suffered the boat to be carried along by the
current, indulging a pleasing forgetfulness or fallacious hopes.
How fallacious! yet, without hope, what is to sustain life, but the
fear of annihilation - the only thing of which I have ever felt a
dread. I cannot bear to think of being no more - of losing myself -
though existence is often but a painful consciousness of misery;
nay, it appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or
that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow,
should only be organised dust - ready to fly abroad the moment the
spring snaps, or the spark goes out which kept it together. Surely
something resides in this heart that is not perishable, and life is
more than a dream.
Sometimes, to take up my oar once more, when the sea was calm, I was
amused by disturbing the innumerable young star fish which floated
just below the surface; I had never observed them before, for they
have not a hard shell like those which I have seen on the seashore.
They look like thickened water with a white edge, and four purple
circles, of different forms, were in the middle, over an incredible
number of fibres or white lines.
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