I remembered something of what I had used
to feel in such places, but instead of believing in that, I doubted now
whether it had not been all a trick that I played myself--a fancied
pleasure only. I was walking along, then, with the sea behind me. It was
a warm, cloudy day--I had had no sunshine since I came out. All at once I
turned--I don't know why. There lay the gray sea, but not as I had seen
it last, not all gray. It was dotted, spotted, and splashed all over with
drops, pools, and lakes of light, of all shades of depth, from a light
shimmer of tremulous gray, through a half light that turned the prevailing
lead colour into translucent green that seemed to grow out of its depths--
through this, I say, to brilliant light, deepening and deepening till my
very soul was stung by the triumph of the intensity of its molten silver.
There was no sun upon me. But there were breaks in the clouds over the sea,
through which, the air being filled with vapour, I could see the long lines
of the sun-rays descending on the waters like rain--so like a rain of light
that the water seemed to plash up in light under their fall. I questioned
the past no more; the present seized upon me, and I knew that the past was
true, and that nature was more lovely, more awful in her loveliness than I
could grasp.
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