9937 "Take my breath. But, yes! we'll be happy in our own way. We're sea-birds. We've said adieu to land. Not to one another. We shall be friends?" "Always." "This is going to last?" "Ever so long." They had a spell of steady swimming, companionship to inspirit it. Browny was allowed place a little foremost, and she guessed not wherefore, in her flattered emulation. "I'm bound for France." "Slue a point to the right: southeast by south. We shall hit Dunquerque." "I don't mean to be picked up by boats." "We'll decline." "You see I can swim." "I was sure of it." They stopped their talk - for the pleasure of the body to be savored in the mind, they thought; and so took Nature's counsel to rest their voices awhile. Considering that she had not been used of late to long immersions, and had not broken her fast, and had talked much for a sea-nymph, Weyburn spied behind him on a shore seeming flat down, far removed. "France next time," he said: "we'll face to the rear." "Now?" said she, big with blissful conceit of her powers, and incredulous of such a command from him. "You may be feeling tired presently." The musical sincerity of her "Oh no, not I!" sped through his limbs: he had a willingness to go onward still some way. She But his words fastened the heavy land on her spirit, knocked at the habit of obedience. Her stroke of the arms paused. inclined to his example, and he set it shoreward. They swam silently, high, low, creatures of the smooth green roller. She, though He heard the water-song of her swimming. breathing equably at the nostrils, lay deep. The water shocked. at her chin, and curled round the under lip. He had a faint anxiety; and not so sensible of a weight in the sight of land as she was, he chattered by snatches, rallied her, encouraged her to continue sportive for this once, letting her feel it was but a once and had its respected limit with him. So it was not out of the world. XVII-622 Ah, friend Matey! And that was right and good on land; but rightness and goodness flung earth's shadow across her brilliancy here, and any stress on "this once" withdrew her liberty to revel in it, putting an end to a perfect holiday; and silence, too, might hint at fatigue. She began to think her muteness lost her the bloom of the enchantment, robbing her of her heavenly frolic lead, since friend Matey resolved to be as eminently good in salt water as on land. Was he unaware that they were boy and girl again? she washed pure of the intervening years, new born, by blessing of the sea; worthy of him here! - that is, a swimmer worthy of him, his comrade in salt water. "You're satisfied I swim well?" she said. "It would go hard with me if we raced a long race.” "I really was out for France." "I was ordered to keep you for England.” She gave him Browny's eyes. "We've turned our backs on Triton." "The ceremony was performed." "When?" "The minute I spoke of it and you splashed." "Matey! Matey Weyburn!" "Browny Farrell!" "O Matey! she's gone!" "She's here." "Try to beguile me, then, that our holiday's not over. You won't forget this hour?" "No time of mine on earth will live so brightly for me." "I have never had one like it. I could go under and be happy; go to old Triton and wait for you; teach him to speak your proper Christian name. He hasn't heard it yet- heard 'Matey never yet has been taught Matthew.' "Aminta!" >> "O my friend! my dear!" she cried, in the voice of the wounded, like a welling of her blood, "my strength will leave me. I may play not you: you play with a weak vessel. Swim, and be quiet. How far do you count it?" "Under a quarter of a mile." "Don't imagine me tired." "Matey, I'm for a dive." He went after the ball of silver and bubbles, and they came up together. There is no history of events below the surface. H 9939 She shook off her briny blindness, and settled to the full sweep of the arms, quite silent now. Some emotion, or exhaustion from the strain of the swimmer's breath in speech, stopped her playfulness. The pleasure she still knew was a recollection of the outward swim, when she had been privileged to cast away sex with the push from earth, as few men will believe that women, beautiful women, ever wish to do; and often and ardently during the run ahead they yearn for Nature to grant them their one short holiday truce. But Aminta forgave him for bringing earth so close to her when there was yet a space of salt water between her and shore; and she smiled at times, that he might not think she was looking grave. They touched the sand at the first draw of the ebb; and this being earth, Matey addressed himself to the guardian and absolving genii of matter-of-fact by saying, "Did you inquire about the tides? Her head shook, stunned with what had passed. She waded to shore, after motioning for him to swim on. Men, in the comparison beside their fair fellows, are so little sensationally complex, that his one feeling now as to what had passed, was relief at the idea of his presence having been a warrantable protectorship. Aminta's return from sea-nymph to the state of woman crossed annihilation on the way back to sentience, and picked-up meaningless pebbles and shells of life, between the sea's verge and her tent's shelter: hardly her own life to her understanding yet, except for the hammer Memory became to strike her insensible, at here and there a recollected word or nakedness of her soul. What had she done, what revealed, to shiver at for the remainder of her days! He He swam along the shore to where the boat was paddled, spying at her bare feet on the sand, her woman's form. waved, and the figure in the striped tunic and trousers waved her response, apparently the same person he had quitted. Dry and clad, and decently formal under the transformation, they met at Mrs. Collett's breakfast table; and in each hung the doubt whether land was the dream, or sea. 9940 A FROM MODERN LOVE› LL other joys of life he strove to warm, And magnify, and catch them to his lip; The coming minute mock the one that went. And the great price we pay for it full worth; WR EVENING E SAW the swallows gathering in the sky, Our spirits grew as we went side by side. In multitudinous chatterings as the flood Full brown came from the West, and like pale blood Expanded to the upper crimson cloud. Love, that had robbed us of immortal things, This little moment mercifully gave, Where I have seen across the twilight wave PROSPER MÉRIMÉE (1803-1870) BY GRACE KING NE of the magisterial critics of Mérimée's day, passing judgment upon his writings, dismisses personal details about the author with the remark: "As for the biography of Prosper Mérimée, it is like the history of a happy people,- it does not exist. One knows only that he was educated in a college of Paris, that he has studied law, that he has been received as a lawyer, that he has never pleaded; and the papers have taken pains to inform us that he is to-day secretary to M. le Comte d'Argout. Those who know him familiarly see in him nothing more than a man of very simple manners, with a solid education, reading Italian and modern Greek with ease, and speaking English and Spanish with remarkable purity." This was written in 1832, when Mérimée in his thirtieth year had attained celebrity not only in the literary world of Paris, but in the world of literary Europe, as the author of the Theatre de Clara Gazul'; 'La Guzla'; 'La Chronique de Charles IX.'; 'Mateo Falcone'; 'Tamango'; 'La Partie de Tric-Trac '; 'Le Vase Etrusque'; 'La Double Méprise'; 'La Vision de Charles XI.': most of which Taine pronounced masterpieces of fiction, destined to immortality as classics. PROSPER MÉRIMÉE No tribute could have been better devised to please Mérimée, and praise his writings, than this one to the impersonality of his art, and the dispensation of it from any obligation to its author. "We should write and speak," he held, "so that no one would notice, at least immediately, that we were writing or speaking differently from any one else." But as that most impersonal of modern critics, Walter Pater, keenly observes: "Mérimée's superb self-effacement, his impersonality, is itself but an effective personal trait, and transferred to art, becomes a markedly peculiar quality of literary beauty." And he pronounces in a sentence the judgment of Mérimée's literary posterity upon him: "For in truth this creature who had no care for half-lights, and like his creations, had no atmosphere about him, |