a man who meets some vision in a dream and does not know if he is dreaming or awake, and yet knows all the time that it is real. Then he would take his fascinated gaze away from her, and look down at the moon-white road, and stamp it with his foot, and kick and scurf the ground of the moon-white road to see if it was real, and then lift his head and look at her again, and turn and see the great, sweet fields and meadows dreaming in the moonlight, and cows down upon their knees, facing toward him with their strange and silent stare, or faced one way and grazing towards him through the moon pastures with sweet, wrenching pull of teeth; and then he would see the dark and sleeping woods of night, with all their mystery and loveliness and wild and solemn joy, and secret terror, and all the grand and casual folds and convolutions of the sleeping, moon-enchanted earth, and far away the moon-blaze and wink, the herring glamour, and the dancing scallop fires and all the darkness, coolness, and the velvet-breasted mystery of the strange and silent river, the haunted river, the great Hudson River, drawing on for ever from the dark and secret earth the sources of its depthless tides, and in the night-time, in the dark, with soundless movings of its tide, drawing on for ever like time and silence past the strange and secret land, the mysterious earth, the sleeping cities and the lost and lonely little towns of dark America.
It was all so strange, so impossibly lovely, so hauntingly familiar—the grand and casual landscape of America—and it seemed past words and past belief, to be so much a part of this girl’s life, and she a part of it, that all the haunting mystery of the secret earth, the silent river, and all its sweetness, fragrance and fertility, its casual homeliness, and its unuttered loveliness had entered into her, had fed her life, had shaped her to its special quality, and like a solemn music was mixed into the conduits of her blood and life and soul for ever, so that now he could not bear to see her taken from it, he felt a cruel and ruinous loss and waste in this destructive separation—a loss that touched not only this girl’s life, but the life of the great earth and all America as well—a loss as if a rare and glorious flower were brutally uprooted from the only earth that could produce or nurture it and which would henceforth be, by reason of its treasured loss, bereft. And feeling so, a blind and bitter resentment surged up in his heart, his whole life and spirit were set against her going, and in his soul an unforgiving and protesting voice kept saying doggedly:
