n the deck, but would sink into
the speechless profound of the sea.

With the bloody, blind film before my eyes, there was a still stranger
hum in my head, as if a hornet were there; and I thought to myself,
Great God! this is Death! Yet these thoughts were unmixed with alarm.
Like frost-work that flashes and shifts its scared hues in the sun, all
my braided, blended emotions were in themselves icy cold and calm.

So protracted did my fall seem, that I can even now recall the feeling
of wondering how much longer it would be, ere all was over and I
struck. Time seemed to stand still, and all the worlds seemed poised on
their poles, as I fell, soul-becalmed, through the eddying whirl and
swirl of the maelstrom air.

At first, as I have said, I must have been precipitated head-foremost;
but I was conscious, at length, of a swift, flinging motion of my
limbs, which involuntarily threw themselves out, so that at last I must
have fallen in a heap. This is more likely, from the circumstance, that
when I struck the sea, I felt as if some one had smote me slantingly
across the shoulder and along part of my right side.

As I gushed into the sea, a thunder-boom sounded in my ear; my soul
seemed flying from my mouth. The feeling of death flooded over me with
the billows. The blow from the sea must have turned me, so that I sank
almost feet foremost through a soft, seething foamy lull. Some current
seemed hurrying me away; in a trance I yielded, and sank deeper down
with a glide. Purple and pathless was the deep calm now around me,
flecked by summer lightnings in an azure afar. The horrible nausea was
gone; the bloody, blind film turned a pale green; I wondered whether I
was yet dead, or still dying. But of a sudden some fashionless form
brushed my side--some inert, coiled fish of the sea; the thrill of
being alive again tingled in my nerves, and the strong shunning of
death shocked me through.

For one instant an agonising revulsion came over me as I found myself
utterly sinking. Next moment the force of my fall was expanded; and
there I hung, vibrating in the mid-deep. What wild sounds then rang in
my ear! One was a soft moaning, as of low waves on the beach; the other
wild and heartlessly jubilant, as of the sea in the height of a
tempest. Oh soul! thou then heardest life and death: as he who stands
upon the Corinthian shore hears both the Ionian and the Aegean waves.
The life-and-death poise soon passed; and then I found my