"--p. 52.
Two more passages, and they must suffice as examples. Here the
isolation is perfect; but it is the isolation, not of the place and
the actors only; it is, as it were, almost our own in an equal
degree;
"Ourselves too seeming
Not as spectators, accepted into it, immingled, as truly
Part of it as are the kine of the field lying there by the birches."
"There, across the great rocky wharves a wooden bridge goes,
Carrying a path to the forest; below,--three hundred yards, say,--
Lower in level some twenty-five feet, thro' flats of shingle,
Stepping-stones and a cart-track cross in the open valley.
But, in the interval here, the boiling pent-up water
Frees itself by a final descent, attaining a bason
Ten feet wide and eighteen long, with whiteness and fury
Occupied partly, but mostly pellucid, pure, a mirror;
Beautiful there for the color derived from green rocks under;
Beautiful most of all where beads of foam uprising
Mingle their clouds of white with the delicate hue of the stillness.
Cliff over cliff for its sides, with rowan and pendent birch-boughs,
Here it lies, unthought of above at the bridge and pathway,
Still more concealed from below by wood and rocky projection.
You are shut in, left alone with yourself and perfection of water,
Hid on all sides, left alone with yourself and the goddess of bathing.
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