"
II
I looked to the weather side, and the summer had departed. The sea was
rocking, and shaken with gathering wrath. Upon its surface sat mighty
mists, which grouped themselves into arches and long cathedral aisles.
Down one of these, with the fiery pace of a quarrel from a cross-bow,
ran a frigate right athwart our course. "Are they mad?" some voice
exclaimed from our deck. "Do they woo their ruin?" But in a moment, as
she was close upon us, some impulse of a heady current or local vortex
gave a wheeling bias to her course, and off she forged without a shock.
As she ran past us, high aloft amongst the shrouds stood the lady of
the pinnace. The deeps opened ahead in malice to receive her, towering
surges of foam ran after her, the billows were fierce to catch her. But
far away she was borne into desert spaces of the sea: whilst still by
sight I followed her, as she ran before the howling gale, chased by
angry sea-birds and by maddening billows; still I saw her, as at the
moment when she ran past us, standing amongst the shrouds, with her
white draperies streaming before the wind. There she stood, with hair
dishevelled, one hand clutched amongst the tackling--rising, sinking,
fluttering, trembling, praying; there for leagues I saw her as she
stood, raising at intervals one hand to heaven, amidst the fiery crests
of the pursuing waves and the raving of the storm; until at last, upon
a sound from afar of malicious laughter and mockery, all was hidden for
ever in driving showers; and afterwards, but when I knew not, nor how,
III
Sweet funeral bells from some incalculable distance, wailing over the
dead that die before the dawn, awakened me as I slept in a boat moored
to some familiar shore.
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