United States or Monaco ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Once upon a time it was inhabited by a bold miller and his stout son. One morning, as he was looking seawards, just as he was about to turn on the water to move his mill, he observed above the sea-mists the masts of a tall ship. What object she had in coming so near the coast he could not divine; but it was as well to be cautious, lest she should prove an enemy.
Vermilion-finned and with eyes of bossy gold, the tunnies went by in shoals, but he heeded them not. His spear lay by his side unused, and his baskets of plaited osier were empty. With lips parted, and eyes dim with wonder, he sat idle in his boat and listened, listening till the sea-mists crept round him, and the wandering moon stained his brown limbs with silver.
Whether there was something in those island idiosyncracies, shapeless as sea-mists, with which this story began, or whether the Roman imprint had really been lighter than in Gaul, the feudal undergrowth prevented even a full attempt to build the Civitas Dei, or ideal mediæval state. What emerged was a compromise, which men long afterwards amused themselves by calling a constitution.
There are tales of a mysterious tall man in a silk hat, who once came out of the sea-mists and apparently out of the sea, stepping softly across the sandy fields and through the small back garden at twilight, till he was heard talking to the lodger at his open window. The colloquy seemed to end in a quarrel.
Thenceforth for many years he was a kind of Guardian Spirit over China: appearing suddenly wherever there was distress or need of help: at dawn in mountain Chungnan by Changan town in the north; at noon, maybe, by the southern sea; at dusk he might be seen a-dragon-back above the sea-mists rolling in over Yangtse; and all in the same day.
So as the morning wore on, and the sea-mists gave place to burning sunshine, and this again to heavy thunder-clouds collected by the unceasing cannonade, still more and more of the reserves of the Fifth Division were pushed up, until none but the volunteers and a handful of the 9th Regiment remained in the trenches.
In this exigency, it did not help her that she knew, from hear-say, just how England looked; that she could see, in fancy, its ever-green grass, thick hedges, and spreading trees; its never-dry rivers; its hoary old cathedrals; its fogs, and sea-mists, and over-populous cities.
The sea is tumbling in over the shallows and the sandy flats with a roar, muffled in the sea-mists drifting inland. The horizon is lost in a gray mist. All vastness, the clouds are piled up like giant rocks, and there is a 'brool' over the sea that sounds like some passage of doom.
Mary to Borhaze across the moor was certainly a wild, rambling, beautiful affair, and when the sea-mists swept across it and the wind carried the cry of the Bell of Trezent Rock in and out above and below, you had a strange and moving experience. Mr. Lasher was certainly compelled to ride on his bicycle from Clinton St. Mary to Borhaze and back again, and never thought it either strange or moving.
Free, isolated, wealthy, powerful; famous throughout Europe for the pomp of her state equipage, and for the immorality of her private manners; ruled by a prudent aristocracy, who spent vast wealth on public shows and on the maintenance of a more than imperial civic majesty: Venice, with her pavement of liquid chrysoprase, with her palaces of porphyry and marble, her frescoed façades, her quays and squares aglow with the costumes of the Levant, her lagoons afloat with the galleys of all nations, her churches floored with mosaics, her silvery domes and ceilings glittering with sculpture bathed in molten gold: Venice luxurious in the light and colour of a vaporous atmosphere, where sea-mists rose into the mounded summer clouds; arched over by the broad expanse of sky, bounded only by the horizon of waves and plain and distant mountain ranges, and reflected in all its many hues of sunrise and sunset upon the glassy surface of smooth waters: Venice asleep like a miracle of opal or of pearl upon the bosom of an undulating lake: here and here only on the face of the whole globe was the unique city wherein the pride of life might combine with the lustre of the physical universe to create and stimulate in the artist a sense of all that was most sumptuous in the pageant of the world of sense.
Word Of The Day