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Updated: May 22, 2025
Before us lie islands and continents of lilies, acres of charms, whole, vast, unbroken surfaces of stainless whiteness. And yet, as we approach them, every islanded cup that floats in lonely dignity, apart from the multitude, appears as perfect in itself, couched in white expanded perfection, its reflection taking a faint glory of pink that is scarcely perceptible in the flower.
John Lateran: miles of former villa gardens, with quincunxes and flower-beds, cut up for cabbage-growing, wide open spaces where the wall of a temple, the arch of an aqueduct, rose crowned with wall-flower and weeds out of the rank grass, the briars and nettles, the heaps of broken masonry and plaster, among which shone beneath the darting lizards, scraps of vermilion wall-fresco, the chips of purple porphyry or dark-green serpentine; long avenues of trees early sere, closed in by arum-fringed walls, or by ditches where the withered reeds creaked beneath the festoons of clematis and wild vine; solemn and solitary wildernesses within the city walls, where the silence was broken only by the lowing of the herds driven along by the shaggy herdsman on his shaggy horse, by the long-drawn, guttural chant of the carter stretched on the top of his cart, and the jingle of his horse's bells; places inaccessible to the present, a border-land of the past, and which, as Alfieri says, thinking of those many times when he must have reined in his horse, and vaguely and wistfully looked out on to the green desolation islanded with ruins and traversed by the vast procession of the aqueducts, invited one to meditate, and cry, and be a poet.
Once, creeping into a farm, which was islanded by water, "Jane Pervyse," our homeless dog, led us up to the wrecked bedroom. A bonnet and best dress were in the cupboard. A soldier put on the bonnet and grimaced. Always after that, in passing the house, "Jane Pervyse" trembled and whined as if it had been her home till the destruction came. In our house, we cleaned vegetables.
Often, when the two old people were in bed and asleep, Gibbie would be out watching the moon rise seated, still as ruined god of Egypt, on a stone of the mountain-side, islanded in space, nothing alive and visible near him, perhaps not even a solitary night-wind blowing and ceasing like the breath of a man's life, and the awfully silent moon sliding up from the hollow of a valley below.
My hair was matted and wild my limbs soiled with salt ooze; while at sea, I had thrown off those of my garments that encumbered me, and the rain drenched the thin summer-clothing I had retained my feet were bare, and the stunted reeds and broken shells made them bleed the while, I hurried to and fro, now looking earnestly on some distant rock which, islanded in the sands, bore for a moment a deceptive appearance now with flashing eyes reproaching the murderous ocean for its unutterable cruelty.
Another citizen was riding homeward, when the solid and strongly embanked road was swept away before and behind him, and he had barely time to unhitch his horse and escape, leaving his carriage islanded between the chasms.
It cannot be that I shall never behold a fellow being more! never! never! not in the course of years! Shall I wake, and speak to none, pass the interminable hours, my soul, islanded in the world, a solitary point, surrounded by vacuum? Will day follow day endlessly thus? No! no! a God rules the world providence has not exchanged its golden sceptre for an aspic's sting.
Hochmuller's suburb, and Ann Eliza was presently jolting past the narrow brick houses islanded between vacant lots like giant piles in a desolate lagoon. When the car reached the end of its journey she got out and stood for some time trying to remember which turn Mr. Ramy had taken.
Boykin, at this point, advanced across the wide expanse of Aubusson on which his wife and Durham were islanded in a state of propinquity without privacy. "What's that, Bessy? Hah, Durham, how are you? Didn't see you at Auteuil this afternoon. You don't race? Busy sight-seeing, I suppose? What was that my wife was telling you? Oh, about Madame de Treymes."
In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.
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