Phantastes, A Faerie Romance

At length, on getting past an abrupt turn in the passage, through

which I had to force myself, I saw, a few yards ahead of me, the

long-forgotten daylight shining through a small opening, to which the

path, if path it could now be called, led me. With great difficulty I

accomplished these last few yards, and came forth to the day. I stood on

the shore of a wintry sea, with a wintry sun just a few feet above its

horizon-edge. It was bare, and waste, and gray. Hundreds of hopeless

waves rushed constantly shorewards, falling exhausted upon a beach

of great loose stones, that seemed to stretch miles and miles in both

directions. There was nothing for the eye but mingling shades of

gray; nothing for the ear but the rush of the coming, the roar of the

breaking, and the moan of the retreating wave. No rock lifted up a

sheltering severity above the dreariness around; even that from which I

had myself emerged rose scarcely a foot above the opening by which I

had reached the dismal day, more dismal even than the tomb I had left.

A cold, death-like wind swept across the shore, seeming to issue from a

pale mouth of cloud upon the horizon. Sign of life was nowhere visible.

I wandered over the stones, up and down the beach, a human imbodiment of

the nature around me. The wind increased; its keen waves flowed through

my soul; the foam rushed higher up the stones; a few dead stars began

to gleam in the east; the sound of the waves grew louder and yet more

despairing. A dark curtain of cloud was lifted up, and a pale blue rent

shone between its foot and the edge of the sea, out from which rushed an

icy storm of frozen wind, that tore the waters into spray as it passed,

and flung the billows in raving heaps upon the desolate shore. I could

bear it no longer.

"I will not be tortured to death," I cried; "I will meet it half-way.

The life within me is yet enough to bear me up to the face of Death, and

then I die unconquered."

Before it had grown so dark, I had observed, though without any

particular interest, that on one part of the shore a low platform of

rock seemed to run out far into the midst of the breaking waters.

Towards this I now went, scrambling over smooth stones, to which scarce

even a particle of sea-weed clung; and having found it, I got on it, and

followed its direction, as near as I could guess, out into the tumbling

chaos. I could hardly keep my feet against the wind and sea. The waves

repeatedly all but swept me off my path; but I kept on my way, till I

reached the end of the low promontory, which, in the fall of the waves,

rose a good many feet above the surface, and, in their rise, was covered

with their waters. I stood one moment and gazed into the heaving abyss

beneath me; then plunged headlong into the mounting wave below. A

blessing, like the kiss of a mother, seemed to alight on my soul; a

calm, deeper than that which accompanies a hope deferred, bathed my

spirit.