But with this
happiness was mixed the consciousness that it was soon to end; each
stroke of the oar resounded in our hearts as one step of the day that
brought us nearer to separation. Who knows whether these trembling
leaves may not to-morrow have fallen in the waters? If this moss on
which we still can sit may not to-morrow be covered with a thick mantle
of snow; if this blue sky, these illumined rocks and sparkling waves,
may not, during the mists of this next night, be enveloped and
confounded in one dim and wintry ocean?
A long sigh would escape our lips at thoughts like these; but we never
communicated them to each other, for fear of arousing misfortune by
naming it. Oh, who, in the course of his life, has not felt some joy
without security and without a morrow; when life seems concentrated in
one short hour which we would wish to make eternal, and which we feel
slipping away minute by minute, while we listen to the pendulum which
counts the seconds, or look at the hand that seems to gallop o'er the
dial, or watch a carriage-wheel, of which each turn abridges distance,
or hearken to the splashing of a prow that distances the waves, and
brings us nearer to the shore where we must descend from the heaven of
our dreams on the bleak and barren strand of harsh reality.
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