The Argosy — page 236: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Letters from Majorca. 219 her daily life: or a cavalier, cloaked and muffled, shivering with what he considers a freezing atmosphere, and we a balmy, beautiful air. If we wait long enough, we shall assuredly hear the old watchman with his melancholy cry, see the gleam of his lantern mysteriously flashing about the archway, into which he ventures for a moment, and then turns back again. As I have already said, he reminds one of many things : and hearing him I seem to hear again Mendelssohn’s grand setting to the words: “Sleepers wake! a voice is calling: itis the watchman on the walls.” But here, it is we who are on the walls; the watchman is down ‘below ; and he recedes, and his voice dies away. And the night goes back to that intense quiet which gives one a feeling of such pro- found loneliness. You seem face to face with death and eternity: you realise the fathomless mystery, the awful certainty of both. To some, a savour of life unto life: and to others—what P All this we went through to-night; for more often than not, these fortifications are our evening stroll. Everything about it has the strange fascination of utter stillness and solitude, of great surround- ings and grand outlines, the wide sweep of a wonderful sky. As for the town itself, it puts up its shutters, and metaphorically or actually goes to bed very early. ‘The dark streets and closed houses are depressing and melancholy. We prefer the silent ramparts. Then we come in, and H. C., after sitting for half an hour like a graven image or a deaf-mute, suddenly glows with the light of inspi- ration, pens a Couplet to Capella, or an Ode to Orion, inflicts his composition upon me, and then magnanimously retires to solitude and slumber. I am left alone; but it is not the most unpleasant hour of my day—or night—that in which [ hold uninterrupted converse with you, and let my pen take its wandering course. And, as I live—there again, is the old watchman, cloaked, lanterned, heavy-shod, heavy-limbed, announcing the small hours. And there is the dawn in the East, and I must hasten away like a ghost at cock- crow. Benediction rest upon you: and on the thrice sacred head who makes our sunshine in this world, and has unfailingly pointed the way to the next. conniclaoolks (>) (SO)