limbs rounded into robust symmetry, the thin cheeks grew peachy
with richer life; for the strength of the sea had entered into
her; the sharp breath of the sea had renewed and brightened her
young blood....

... Thou primordial Sea, the awfulness of whose antiquity hath
stricken all mythology dumb;--thou most wrinkled diving Sea, the
millions of whose years outnumber even the multitude of thy hoary
motions;--thou omniform and most mysterious Sea, mother of the
monsters and the gods,--whence shine eternal youth? Still do thy
waters hold the infinite thrill of that Spirit which brooded
above their face in the Beginning!--still is thy quickening
breath an elixir unto them that flee to thee for life,--like the
breath of young girls, like the breath of children, prescribed
for the senescent by magicians of old,--prescribed unto weazened
elders in the books of the Wizards.


III

... Eighteen hundred and sixty-seven;--midsummer in the
pest-smitten city of New Orleans.

Heat motionless and ponderous. The steel-blue of the sky
bleached from the furnace-circle of the horizon;--the lukewarm
river ran yellow and noiseless as a torrent of fluid wax. Even
sounds seemed blunted by the heaviness of the air;--the rumbling
of wheels, the reverberation of footsteps, fell half-toned upon
the ear, like sounds that visit a dozing brain.