After cooling the iron machine in the sea, I collected the human ashes and placed them in a box, which I took on board the Bolivar.
There are those still living who have shaken the hard, quick hand that snatched Shelley’s heart from the coals. Sir Sidney Colvin, for instance, who tells much about Trelawny in his Memories and Notes of Persons and Places. And ghastly as the above account may seem to those of tender sensibility, the parable it implies is too rich to be omitted. Lo! were they not words of Shelley’s that winged the greatest popular success in recent fiction?[A] And, though lulled long ago by the blue Mediterranean—
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams—
that burning, reckless heart survives to us little corrupted by time—survives as a symbol of poetic energy superior to the common routines of life. “Mighty meat for little guests, when the heart of Shelley was laid in the cemetery of Caius Cestius!”
[A] If Winter Comes.
MIDSUMMER IN SALAMIS
In midsummer the morning walk to the station is one long snuff of green and gold. On the winding stony lane through the Estates, before you reach the straight highway to the railroad, it is a continual sharp intake through the nostrils, an attempt to savour and identify the rich, moist smells of early day. That tangle of woodland we would like to call by the good old English word spinney, if only to haul in an equally ancient pun. It is in the spinney that you get the top of the morning. Dew is on the darkening blackberries. Little gauzy cobwebs are spread everywhere on grass and bushes, suggesting handkerchiefs dropped by revelling midnight dryads. The little handkerchiefs are all very soppy—do the dryads suffer from hay fever? As you emerge onto the straight station road, it is comforting if you see, not far away, some commuter whose time-sense is reliable trudging not too far ahead. When that long perspective is empty anxiety fills the breast. Across the level Long Island plain come occasional musical whistles from trains on the other line—the Westbury branch. But the practiced commuter knows his own whistle and alarms not at alien shrillings.