Here, I can’t but think, is imagination.
Mr. Aytoun, however, noted none of those passages, nor that where, in tempest and thunder, a shipwrecked sailor swims to the strange boat, sees the Living Love and the Dead, and falls back into the trough of the wave. But even the friendly pencil of Bon Gaultier approves the passage where an isle rises above the sea, and the boat is lightly stranded on the shore of pure and silver shells. The horrors of corruption, in the Third Chimera, may be left unquoted, Aytoun parodies—
“The chalk, the chalk, the cheese, the cheese, the cheeses,
And straightway dropped he down upon his kneeses.”
Julio comes back to reason, hates the dreadful bride, and feeds on limpets, “by the mass, he feasteth well!”
There was a holy hermit on the isle,
“I ween like other hermits, so was he.”
He is Agathè’s father, and he has retired to an eligible island where he may repent his cruelty to his daughter. Julio tells his tale, and goes mad again. The apostrophe to Lunacy which follows is marked “Beautiful” by Aytoun, and is in the spirit of Charles Lamb’s remark that madness has pleasures unknown to the sane.
“Thou art, thou art alone,
A pure, pure being, but the God on high
Is with thee ever as thou goest by.”
Julio watches again beside the Dead, till morning comes, bringing
“A murmur far and far, of those that stirred
Within the great encampment of the sea.”