with the sea and the earth, placid as a god.

Where were now all his vanities and his cruelties, his schemes and his
duplicities? What had become of all his loves and his illusions, his
disappointments and his disgusts, and the implacable reaction after
pleasure? He remembered none of them. His spirit had renounced them all,
and with the absence of desire, he had found peace.

Desire had abandoned its throne and intellect was free to follow its
proper course, and reflect the objective world purely from the outside
point of view; things appeared clearly and precisely under their true
form, in their true colours, in all their real significance and beauty;
every personal sentiment was in abeyance.

'_Die Sterne, die begehrt man nicht--Man freut sich ihrer Pracht._'

One desires not the stars, but rejoices in their splendour--and for the
first time in his life the young man really recognised the poetic
harmony of summer skies at night.

These were the last nights of August, and there was no moon. Innumerable
in the deep starry vault, the constellations throbbed and palpitated
with ardent life. The two Bears, Hercules, Cassiopeia, glittered with so
rapid a palpitation that they seemed almost to approach the earth, to
penetrate the terrestrial atmosphere. The Milky Way flowed wide like a
regal aerian river, a confluence of the waters of Paradise, over a bed
of crystal between starry banks. Brilliant meteors cleft the motionless
air from time to time, gliding lightly and silently as a drop of water
over a sheet of glass. The slow and solemn respiration of the sea
sufficed to measure the peace of the night without disturbing it, and
the pauses were almost sweeter than the music.

In every aspect of the things around him he beheld some analogy to his
own inner life. The landscape became to him a symbol, an emblem, a sign
to guide him through the labyrinthine passes of his own soul. He
discovered secret affinities between the visible life around him and the
intimate life of his desires and memories. 'To me, high mountains are a
_feeling_'--and as the mountains were to Byron, so the sea was to him a
_sentiment_.

Oh, that limpid September sea! Calm and guileless as a sleeping child,
it lay outstretched beneath the pearly sky--now green, the delicate and
precious green of malachite, the little red sails upon it like
flickering tongues of fire, now intensely--almost one might call it
heraldically--blue, and veined with gold l