brace at once
dispelled all drowsiness, feverishness, weariness,--even after the
sultriest nights when the air had seemed to burn, and the mosquitoes
had filled the chamber with a sound as of water boiling in many
kettles. And on mornings when the sea was in too wicked a humor to be
played with, how she felt the loss of her loved sport, and prayed for
calm! Her delicate constitution changed;--the soft, pale flesh became
firm and brown, the meagre limbs rounded into robust symmetry, the thin
cheeks grew peachy with richer life; for the strength of the sea had
entered into her; the sharp breath of the sea had renewed and
brightened her young blood....

... Thou primordial Sea, the awfulness of whose antiquity hath stricken
all mythology dumb;--thou most wrinkled diving Sea, the millions of
whose years outnumber even the multitude of thy hoary motions;--thou
omniform and most mysterious Sea, mother of the monsters and the
gods,--whence shine eternal youth? Still do thy waters hold the
infinite thrill of that Spirit which brooded above their face in the
Beginning!--still is thy quickening breath an elixir unto them that
flee to thee for life,--like the breath of young girls, like the breath
of children, prescribed for the senescent by magicians of
old,--prescribed unto weazened elders in the books of the Wizards.

III

... Eighteen hundred and sixty-seven;--midsummer in the pest-smitten
city of New Orleans.

Heat motionless and ponderous. The steel-blue of the sky bleached from
the furnace-circle of the horizon;--the lukewarm river ran yellow and
noiseless as a torrent of fluid wax. Even sounds seemed blunted by the
heaviness of the air;--the rumbling of wheels, the reverberation of
footsteps, fell half-toned upon the ear, like sounds that visit a
dozing brain.

Daily, almost at the same hour, the continuous sense of atmospheric
oppression became thickened;--a packed herd of low-bellying clouds
lumbered up from the Gulf; crowded blackly against the sun; flickered,
thundered, and burst in torrential rain--tepid, perpendicular--and
vanished utterly away. Then, more furiously than before, the sun
flamed down;--roofs and pavements steamed; the streets seemed to smoke;
the air grew suffocating with vapor; and the luminous city filled with
a faint, sickly odor,--a stale smell, as of dead leaves suddenly
disinterred from wet mould,--as of grasses decomposing after a flood.
Something saffron speckled the slimy water