when land and sea merge in mind and longing...
"blank stillness would for hours reign unbroken on this prairie.
'it is the bed of a dried up sea,' said the
companionless sailor
- no geologist - to himself, musing at the twilight upon the
fixed undulations
of that immense alluvial expanse bounded only by the
horizon,
and missing there the stir that, to alert eyes and ears, animates at all
times the apparent
solitudes of the deep.
but a scene quite at variance with one's antecedents may yet prove suggestive of them.
hooped round by a level rim, the prairie was to john marr a reminder of ocean...
... john marr's shipmates could not all have departed life, yet as subjects of
meditations they were like phantoms of the dead. as the growing sense of his
environment threw him more and more upon retrospective musings, these phantoms...
became spiritual companions, losing something of their first
indistinctness and putting on at last a dim semblance of mute life; and they
were
lit by that aureola circling over any object of the affections in the past,
for reunion with which an imaginative heart passionately yearns."
herman melville, from john marr
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