And then--with the long,
loud, hoarse, despairing roar with which a man, his mouth half full of
water, sinks far out in the ocean--he fell again.
XI
IT was ten o'clock that morning of mid-May. The rain was over. Clouds and
mists were gone, leaving an atmosphere of purest crystal. The sun floated a
globe of gold in the yielding blue. Above the wilderness on a dead treetop,
the perch of an eagle now flashing like a yellow weather-vane, a thrush
poured the spray-like far-falling fountain of his notes over upon the bowed
woods. Beneath him the dull green domes of the trees flashed as though
inlaid with gems, white and rose. Under these domes the wild grapevines,
climbing the forest arches as the oak of stone climbs the arches of a
cathedral, filled the ceiling and all the shadowy spaces between with fresh
outbursts of their voluptuous dew-born fragrance. And around the
rough-haired Satyr feet of these vines the wild hyacinth, too full of its
own honey to stand, fell back on its couch of moss waiting to be visited by
the singing bee.
The whole woods emerged from the cloudy bath of Nature with the coolness,
the freshness, the immortal purity of Diana united to the roseate glow and
mortal tenderness of Venus; and haunted by two spirits: the chaste, unfading
youth of Endymion and the dust-born warmth and eagerness of Dionysus.
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