No surf-bell on
forlorn and perilous shores, no passing knell over the busy market-
place, can speak with a more heavy and disconsolate tongue to human
ears. Each stroke calls up a host of ghostly reverberations in his
mind. And as he stands rooted, it has grown once more so utterly
silent that it seems to him he might hear the church bells ring the
hour out all the world over, not at Chailly only, but in Paris, and
away in outlandish cities, and in the village on the river, where his
childhood passed between the sun and flowers.
IDLE HOURS
The woods by night, in all their uncanny effect, are not rightly to
be understood until you can compare them with the woods by day. The
stillness of the medium, the floor of glittering sand, these trees
that go streaming up like monstrous sea-weeds and waver in the moving
winds like the weeds in submarine currents, all these set the mind
working on the thought of what you may have seen off a foreland or
over the side of a boat, and make you feel like a diver, down in the
quiet water, fathoms below the tumbling, transitory surface of the
sea. And yet in itself, as I say, the strangeness of these nocturnal
solitudes is not to be felt fully without the sense of contrast.
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