--
The noise of waters soundeth to this hour,
When I look seaward through the quiet skies.
ON THE SOURCE OF THE ARVE.
Hear'st thou the dash of water loud and hoarse
With its perpetual tidings upward climb,
Struggling against the wind? Oh, how sublime!
For not in vain from its portentous source,
Thy heart, wild stream, hath yearned for its full force,
But from thine ice-toothed caverns dark as time
At last thou issuest, dancing to the rhyme
Of thy outvolleying freedom! Lo, thy course
Lies straight before thee as the arrow flies,
Right to the ocean-plains. Away, away!
Thy parent waits thee, and her sunset dyes
Are ruffled for thy coming, and the gray
Of all her glittering borders flashes high
Against the glittering rocks: oh, haste, and fly!
PART III.--HIS MANHOOD.
CHAPTER I.
IN THE DESERT.
A life lay behind Robert Falconer, and a life lay before him. He
stood on a shoal between.
The life behind him was in its grave. He had covered it over and
turned away. But he knew it would rise at night.
The life before him was not yet born; and what should issue from
that dull ghastly unrevealing fog on the horizon, he did not care.
Thither the tide setting eastward would carry him, and his future
must be born. All he cared about was to leave the empty garments of
his dead behind him--the sky and the fields, the houses and the
gardens which those dead had made alive with their presence.
Travel, motion, ever on, ever away, was the sole impulse in his
heart.
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