On all sides near, the meadows were sheets of water, the woods seemed to drift upon a lake; a swan's nest was washed past on broken rushes, the great silvery birds beating their heavy wings upon the air, and pursuing their ruined home with cries. Beyond, everything was veiled in the twilight of the damp gray vapor; a world half seen, half shrouded, lovely exceedingly, filled with all divine possibilities and all hidden powers: a world such as Youth beholds with longing eyes in its visions of the future.
"A beautiful world!" he said to himself; and he smiled wearily as he said it.
Beautiful, certainly; in that delicious shadow; in that vague light; in that cloudlike mist, wherein the earth met heaven.
Beautiful, certainly; all those mystical shapes rising from the sea of moisture which hid the earth and all the things that toiled on it. It was beautiful, this calm, dim, morning world, in which there was no sound except the distant ringing of unseen bells; this veil of vapor, whence sprang these fairy and fantastic shapes that cleft the watery air; this colorless transparent exhalation, breathing up from the land to the sky, in which all homely things took grace and mystery, and every common and familiar form became transfigured.
It was beautiful; but this landscape had been seen too long and closely by him for it to have power left to cheat his senses.
Under that pure and mystical veil of the refracted rain things vile, and things full of anguish, had their being:—the cattle in the slaughter-houses; the drunkard in the hovels; disease and debauch and famine; the ditch, that was the common grave of all the poor; the hospital, where pincers and knives tore the living nerves in the inquisition of science; the fields, where the women toiled bent, cramped, and hideous; the dumb driven beasts, patient and tortured, forever blameless, yet forever accursed;—all these were there beneath that lovely veil, through which there came so dreamily the slender shafts of spires and the chimes of half-heard bells.
He stood and watched it long, so long that the clouds descended and the vapors shifted away, and the pale sunrays shone clearly over a disenchanted world, where roof joined roof and casement answered casement, and the figures on the crosses became but rude and ill-carved daubs; and the cocks crew to one another, and the herdsmen swore at their flocks, and the oxen flinched at the goad, and the women went forth to their field-work; and all the charm was gone.
Then he turned away.
The cold fresh breath of the morning had breathed upon him, and driven out the dull delicious fancies that had possessed his brain. The simple truth was plain before him: that he had been seen by some stranger in his necessity and succored.
He was thankless; like the suicide, to whom unwelcome aid denies the refuge of the grave, calling him back to suffer, and binding on his shoulders the discarded burden of life's infinite weariness and woes.