But
as yet the air was deliciously fresh and sweet, and Basil bathed his
weariness in it, thinking with a certain luxurious compassion of the
scalded man, and how he was to fare that day. This poor wretch seemed of
another order of beings, as the calamitous always seem to the happy, and
Basil's pity was quite an abstraction; which, again, amused and shocked
him, and he asked his heart of bliss to consider of sorrow a little more
earnestly as the lot of all men, and not merely of an alien creature here
and there. He dutifully tried to imagine another issue to the disaster of
the night, and to realize himself suddenly bereft of her who so filled
his life. He bade his soul remember that, in the security of sleep, Death
had passed them both so close that his presence might well have chilled
their dreams, as the iceberg that grazes the ship in the night freezes
all the air about it. But it was quite idle: where love was, life only
was; and sense and spirit alike put aside the burden that he would have
laid upon them; his revery reflected with delicious caprice the looks,
the tones, the movements that he loved, and bore him far away from the
sad images that he had invited to mirror themselves in it.
IV.
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