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The Empress Marfisa entered in all her bravery, riding cross-legged on her charger and looking round, first this way, then that. She was searching the wood for Bradamante who had retired from the world to "una grotta oscura" to die of grief. The empress looked about and rode here and there but could see Bradamante nowhere, so she rode away to search another part of the wood and the scene changed.
And, with Hume and Kant on my side, I could not think myself presumptuous in holding fast by that opinion. Like Dante, Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, but, unlike Dante, I cannot add, Che la diritta via era smarrita.
The brooding melancholy of atmosphere and scenery penetrates mind and soul, oppressed by an intangible weight, and escape from the Dantesque horrors of this selva oscura is accompanied by a sudden relief and buoyancy of spirit which perceptibly heightens the interest of the old-world city, once isolated by the woodland fastness of Nature, and belonging to an ageless past, surrounding the authentic origin of Djokjacarta with thick clouds of fable and myth.
Was this what lay before the minister of God now in this selva oscura of life? The selling of the Master, of 'the love so sweet, the unction spiritual, for an intellectual satisfaction, the ravaging of all the fair places of the heart by an intellectual need!
when I risked myself, with many misgivings, in little-tried paths of what looked at first like a wilderness, a selva oscura, where, if I did not meet the lion or the wolf, I should be sure to find the critic, the most dangerous of the carnivores, waiting to welcome me after his own fashion. The second Portfolio is closed and laid away.
Still, there wasn't much sickness, and I don't reckon the homeopath ever did winter through. I was livin' with the Bar T outfit on the Oscura range, at that time. "Next doctor that come along was a ostypath." Curly took a chew of tobacco, and paused a moment reflectively. "I said the first feller drifted into vet'inary lines, didn't I?" he resumed. "Well, the ostypath did, too.
And the result is another soul's tragedy, another story of conflict and failure, which throws fresh light on the mysterious capacities of human nature, and warns us, as the letters of Obermann in their day warned the generation of George Sand, that with the rise of new intellectual perceptions new spiritual dangers come into being, and that across the path of continuous evolution which the modern mind is traversing there lies many a selva oscura, many a lonely and desolate tract, in which loss and pain await it.
However, in the case of familiar words with a strong emotional significance, the fusion of image with sound may be almost complete. Who, for example, does not see a sweet and red image of a rose into the word-sounds when he reads: Oh, my love's like a red, red rose That's newly sprung in June. Or, when Dante describes the selva oscura, who does not see the darkness in the word oscura?
Camera Oscura. Mourzuk Couriers. The Kidnapped Circassian Officer. Old Yousef, the Renegade. Dine with the Greek Doctor on a Carnival Day. An Albanian's Revenge. Greece and its Diplomatists. Officials of Mourzuk. An Arab's estimate of God and Mahomet. What is Truth? Improvements of the Commandant of the Troops. How English Politics taste in The Desert. Visit to the Grave of Mr. Ritchie. 22nd.
Nothing human could wander in those pathless shades, by those dead waters. It was the very approach to the world of spirits; over this woodland, seen on the verge of twilight, brooded a silent awe, such as Dante knew in his selva oscura.
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