IX.
… ASSUREDLY the city of St. Pierre never could have seemed more
quaintly beautiful than as I saw it on the evening of my return,
while the shadows were reaching their longest, and sea and sky
were turning lilac. Palm-heads were trembling and masts swaying
slowly against an enormous orange sunset,—yet the beauty of the
sight did not touch me! The deep level and luminous flood of the
bay seemed to me for the first time a dead water;—I found myself
wondering whether it could form a part of that living tide by
which I had been dwelling, full of foam-lightnings and perpetual
thunder. I wondered whether the air about me—heavy and hot and
full of faint leafy smells—could ever have been touched by the
vast pure sweet breath of the wind from the sunrising. And I
became conscious of a profound, unreasoning, absurd regret for
the somnolent little black village of that bare east coast,—
where there are no woods, no ships, no sunsets, … only the ocean
roaring forever over its beach of black sand.
