At length, on getting past an abrupt turn in the passage, through
which I had to force myself, I saw, a few yards ahead of me, the
long-forgotten daylight shining through a small opening, to which the
path, if path it could now be called, led me. With great difficulty I
accomplished these last few yards, and came forth to the day. I stood on
the shore of a wintry sea, with a wintry sun just a few feet above its
horizon-edge. It was bare, and waste, and gray. Hundreds of hopeless
waves rushed constantly shorewards, falling exhausted upon a beach
of great loose stones, that seemed to stretch miles and miles in both
directions. There was nothing for the eye but mingling shades of
gray; nothing for the ear but the rush of the coming, the roar of the
breaking, and the moan of the retreating wave. No rock lifted up a
sheltering severity above the dreariness around; even that from which I
had myself emerged rose scarcely a foot above the opening by which I
had reached the dismal day, more dismal even than the tomb I had left.
A cold, death-like wind swept across the shore, seeming to issue from a
pale mouth of cloud upon the horizon. Sign of life was nowhere visible.
I wandered over the stones, up and down the beach, a human imbodiment of
the nature around me. The wind increased; its keen waves flowed through
my soul; the foam rushed higher up the stones; a few dead stars began
to gleam in the east; the sound of the waves grew louder and yet more
despairing. A dark curtain of cloud was lifted up, and a pale blue rent
shone between its foot and the edge of the sea, out from which rushed an
icy storm of frozen wind, that tore the waters into spray as it passed,
and flung the billows in raving heaps upon the desolate shore. I could
bear it no longer.
"I will not be tortured to death," I cried; "I will meet it half-way.
The life within me is yet enough to bear me up to the face of Death, and
then I die unconquered."
Before it had grown so dark, I had observed, though without any
particular interest, that on one part of the shore a low platform of
rock seemed to run out far into the midst of the breaking waters.
Towards this I now went, scrambling over smooth stones, to which scarce
even a particle of sea-weed clung; and having found it, I got on it, and
followed its direction, as near as I could guess, out into the tumbling
chaos. I could hardly keep my feet against the wind and sea. The waves
repeatedly all but swept me off my path; but I kept on my way, till I
reached the end of the low promontory, which, in the fall of the waves,
rose a good many feet above the surface, and, in their rise, was covered
with their waters. I stood one moment and gazed into the heaving abyss
beneath me; then plunged headlong into the mounting wave below. A
blessing, like the kiss of a mother, seemed to alight on my soul; a
calm, deeper than that which accompanies a hope deferred, bathed my
spirit.