He stood upon a flat boulder, a sort of natural stone table, and a sort of stupor, a poetic amazement, held him stunned. The coast line south of him was full of beauty, the beetling cliffs, their verdurous and dependent edges, the far off headlands, bays paved with colored rock; the coast line north of him so recently formed upon the upturned and disordered face of nature, culminating in crystalline glory in the ice zone about Zit--the pathless waters before him, all, all united in some sort of appeal that eviscerated and smote him, and a nameless longing for companionship, the endless, depthless cry for love coordinate with the bursting fires of desire and devotion transmuted the wild man into something noble and ecstatic.
He left his equipment on the shore and ran forward--from stone to stone he leaped with unpremeditated cunning; his zig zag course, as he passed from one pebble to another, brought him at last to the verge of a tiny harbor entered by a neck of water, and fortressed by dark rocks draped beneath with tressy sea weeds.
His pursuit was checked; he could go no further. His eyes, bright with ardor and delight, sought out the line of pale icebergs, and then they fell below him upon the transparent and liquid beryl lapping languorously at his feet. And as they fell, upon their retinas sprang the image fair and true, of a sleeping woman’s face, dark and beautiful, amid dishevelled hair, rocking in a little boat, as in a cradle, on the quietly heaving bosom of the sea. It was Lhatto.
In the newly systematized psychologies the analysis of love carries our introspection to equilibrating shocks of feeling, of an accommodation between an objective irritant and a subjective impulse, to gratification of sense inwrought with the emotional satisfactions that arise from perceptions of fitness, sympathy, congruity and the like; and doubtless a process of ratiocination would make of love, or find in it, all this. But love remains, and can we not be thankful that it does so remain, a penetrating ecstacy that invades sense and thought, and issues, like an electric fluid, instantaneously from all the surfaces of our feeling, and thus transmutes that feeling, giving it glory and radiance; that it changes the being in whose enraptured soul its flakes of fire have fallen, making the limit of his excellence possible, the range and widest capability of his nature patent, and along with its energizing influence upon all his dynamic powers, awakening the spiritual fires as well; or, more aptly and truly, elevating the outlook, the intention, the design, thrusting upon him by a sort of imperious moral necessity, the sweeter aspects of his relations to beings, to himself, and widening his love by the whole compass of his possible emotional exaltation, so that he become protagonistic, chaste and fair.