“Very remarkable, and all the more striking from that very fact,” I replied.
“But the most striking stanza in the poem,” she continued, running her little thin fingers down the paper, and pinching it at a certain verse, “is the sixty-eighth. Do you remember it?”
“They are all stamped so indelibly on my mind, by their wondrous power and beauty, that I cannot distinguish them by mere numbers; but I can easily recognize it if you will read it again.” This I said leaning forward with an increased air of attention and interest.
“There is no merit about the lines, except that they convey to the mind a vivid impression of the circumstances,” she said, with a preparatory cough, and read:
“And should a comet from the starry sky
Fall with its fiery tail along thy bed,
Oh! what a yawning, cracking chasm dry
Would stretch from parched mouth to fountain head.”
“Miss Finnock!” I said, rapturously, “you are as daring as Milton in your conceptions. Even Dante does not surpass the appalling picture you draw. I can almost see the long, rugged chasm down which the ships are rolling over and over, snapping off their masts, the fish floundering in the steaming pools, while the red serpent of desolation winds its way down the hissing bed.”