To lie still, over the Flats, where the
waters are shallow, and see the crabs crawling and the sculpins gliding
busily and silently beneath the boat,--to rustle in through the long
harsh grass that leads up some tranquil creek,--to take shelter from the
sunbeams under one of the thousand-footed bridges, and look down its
interminable colonnades, crusted with green and oozy growths, studded
with minute barnacles, and belted with rings of dark muscles, while
overhead, streams and thunders that other river, whose every wave is
a human soul flowing to eternity as the river below flows to the
ocean,--lying there moored unseen, in loneliness so profound that
the columns of Tadmoor in the Desert could not seem more remote from
life,--the cool breeze on one's forehead, the stream whispering against
the half-sunken pillars,--why should I tell of these things, that I
should live to see my beloved haunts invaded and the waves blackened
with boats as with a swarm of water-beetles? What a city of idiots
we must be, not to have covered this glorious bay with gondolas and
wherries, as we have just learned to cover the ice in winter with
skaters!
* * * * *
From "The Guardian Angel."
=_213._= THE UNSPOKEN DECLARATION.
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