But my friends declared that such verses were evil augury; so in cheerful mood we left the shallow waters, and, when out at sea, unfurled our sails to catch the favourable breeze.  The laughing morning air filled them, while sun-light bathed earth, sky and ocean—­the placid waves divided to receive our keel, and playfully kissed the dark sides of our little skiff, murmuring a welcome; as land receded, still the blue expanse, most waveless, twin sister to the azure empyrean, afforded smooth conduct to our bark.  As the air and waters were tranquil and balmy, so were our minds steeped in quiet.  In comparison with the unstained deep, funereal earth appeared a grave, its high rocks and stately mountains were but monuments, its trees the plumes of a herse, the brooks and rivers brackish with tears for departed man.  Farewell to desolate towns —­to fields with their savage intermixture of corn and weeds—­to ever multiplying relics of our lost species.  Ocean, we commit ourselves to thee —­even as the patriarch of old floated above the drowned world, let us be saved, as thus we betake ourselves to thy perennial flood.

Adrian sat at the helm; I attended to the rigging, the breeze right aft filled our swelling canvas, and we ran before it over the untroubled deep.  The wind died away at noon; its idle breath just permitted us to hold our course.  As lazy, fair-weather sailors, careless of the coming hour, we talked gaily of our coasting voyage, of our arrival at Athens.  We would make our home of one of the Cyclades, and there in myrtle-groves, amidst perpetual spring, fanned by the wholesome sea-breezes—­we would live long years in beatific union—­Was there such a thing as death in the world?—­

The sun passed its zenith, and lingered down the stainless floor of heaven.  Lying in the boat, my face turned up to the sky, I thought I saw on its blue white, marbled streaks, so slight, so immaterial, that now I said—­ They are there—­and now, It is a mere imagination.  A sudden fear stung me while I gazed; and, starting up, and running to the prow,—­as I stood, my hair was gently lifted on my brow—­a dark line of ripples appeared to the east, gaining rapidly on us—­my breathless remark to Adrian, was followed by the flapping of the canvas, as the adverse wind struck it, and our boat lurched—­swift as speech, the web of the storm thickened over head, the sun went down red, the dark sea was strewed with foam, and our skiff rose and fell in its encreasing furrows.

Behold us now in our frail tenement, hemmed in by hungry, roaring waves, buffeted by winds.  In the inky east two vast clouds, sailing contrary ways, met; the lightning leapt forth, and the hoarse thunder muttered.  Again in the south, the clouds replied, and the forked stream of fire running along the black sky, shewed us the appalling piles of clouds, now met and obliterated by the heaving waves.  Great God!  And we alone—­we three—­ alone—­alone—­sole dwellers on the sea and on the earth, we three must perish!  The vast universe, its myriad worlds, and the plains of boundless earth which we had left—­the extent of shoreless sea around—­contracted to my view—­they and all that they contained, shrunk up to one point, even to our tossing bark, freighted with glorious humanity.