And my heart fainted with longing in my bosom.
Could I but see the Spirit of the Earth, as I saw once the in
dwelling woman of the beech-tree, and my beauty of the pale
marble, I should be content. Content!--Oh, how gladly would I
die of the light of her eyes! Yea, I would cease to be, if that
would bring me one word of love from the one mouth. The twilight
sank around, and infolded me with sleep. I slept as I had not
slept for months. I did not awake till late in the morning;
when, refreshed in body and mind, I rose as from the death that
wipes out the sadness of life, and then dies itself in the new
morrow. Again I followed the stream; now climbing a steep rocky
bank that hemmed it in; now wading through long grasses and wild
flowers in its path; now through meadows; and anon through woods
that crowded down to the very lip of the water.
At length, in a nook of the river, gloomy with the weight of
overhanging foliage, and still and deep as a soul in which the
torrent eddies of pain have hollowed a great gulf, and then,
subsiding in violence, have left it full of a motionless,
fathomless sorrow--I saw a little boat lying. So still was the
water here, that the boat needed no fastening. It lay as if some
one had just stepped ashore, and would in a moment return. But
as there were no signs of presence, and no track through the
thick bushes; and, moreover, as I was in Fairy Land where one
does very much as he pleases, I forced my way to the brink,
stepped into the boat, pushed it, with the help of the
tree-branches, out into the stream, lay down in the bottom, and
let my boat and me float whither the stream would carry us.
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