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The Provost's tenement, of all the lesser houses in the burgh, was the only one that stood in its outer entirety, its arched ceils proof against the malevolent fire. Yet its windows gaped black and empty. The tide was in close on the breast-wall behind, and the sound of it came up and moaned in the close like the sough of a sea-shell held against the ear.
Flowers, beautiful in your sublime decay, I press you to my lips; these northern solitudes, far from the rank Parisian garden where I gathered you, are full of you, even as the sea-shell of the sea, and the sun that sets on this wild moorland evokes the magical verse: "Un soir fait de rose et de bleu mystique Nous échangerons un éclair unique Comme un long sanglot tout chargé d'adieux."
When this type in Greek Art was brought to bear on the interpretation of natural forms into architectural language, we shall curiously discover that the creative pride of the artist and his reverence for the integrity of his Ideal were so great, that he not only subjected these forms to a rigid subservience to the abstract line till Nature was nearly lost in Art, but the immediate adoption of these forms under any circumstances was limited to some three or four of the most ordinary vegetable productions of Greece and to one sea-shell.
Him the Thunderer hurled From th' empyrean headlong to the gulf Of the half-parched Eridanus, where weep Even now the sister trees their amber tears O'er Phaeton untimely dead" In the beautiful lines of Walter Savage Landor, descriptive of the Sea-shell, there is an allusion to the Sun's palace and chariot.
"Young Pan," a garden figure, is witty, elfin, very engaging. He is a seaside Pan instead of the woodland dweller usually portrayed. His foot is rather recklessly one would think, were this not a magical, superhuman being placed heel-down upon the back of a great crab. A pretty pedestal base, with sea-shell decoration, supports the baby god.
And thus as one day a wandering sea-shell had quit the sea and entered the forest, now on another day of that infinite time there reappeared at the edge of the forest the creature it had made.
A gaily-spotted sea-shell was dropped one day close to the last of his little buildings; and I looked that Muhammad Din should build something more than ordinarily splendid on the strength of it. Nor was I disappointed. He meditated for the better part of an hour, and his crooning rose to a jubilant song. Then he began tracing in the dust.
How he would kindle at a passage like this: "To keep the eye clear by a sort of exquisite personal alacrity and cleanliness, extending even to his dwelling-place; to discriminate, ever more and more exactly, select form and colour in things from what was less select; to meditate much on beautiful visible objects, on objects, more especially, connected with the period of youth, on children at play in the morning, the trees in early spring, on young animals, on the fashions and amusements of young men; to keep ever by him, if it were but a single choice flower, a graceful animal or sea-shell, as a token and representation of the whole kingdom of such things; to avoid jealously, in his way through the world, everything repugnant to sight; and, should any circumstance tempt him to a general converse in the range of such objects, to disentangle himself from that circumstance at any cost of place, money, or opportunity: such were, in brief outline, the duties recognised, the rights demanded, in this new formula of life."
At that the sea-shell color went away down low, even to her lips, but no further illumination came to me. Past ghostly hill and moor and still-gleaming flood we flew. "I am happy," I could say at last, "as I ought not to be. In all scenes and places where I may ever be I shall remember this, Vesty." She shivered a little. Ah! the sad old shawl! I clinched my hands.
It was the play of the "Tempest," torn from an old edition of Shakespeare, and was in that delightfully fragmentary condition which most particularly pleases children, because they conceive a mutilated treasure thus found to be more especially their own property something like a rare wild-flower or sea-shell.
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