Nature-notes and impressions : in prose and verse / by Madison Cawein [electronic text]

Sleep came to me distilling dews of dreams, within whose diamond spheres an ethereal world lay of thought and scene. Methought that I was dead; that I was drowned; and, in a cavern vaster and bluer than night, before a shadowy presence of hoary foam and weedy shell, the presence of that Ancient of the Sea, I stood; the shadow of whose sceptre huge, a rib of cloudy pearl, lay white upon me. Around him circled and sang the mermaids, chanting that song whose mystery fills—old and

unchanging—the mouths of the murmur-haunted shells of ocean. And, behold! I heard a mermaid tell in song, standing before that throned and ancient presence, how she had stolen and taken on the beauty and the likeness of a mortal maiden and lured with these the maiden's lover to save her apparently from the sea, dragging him down into its green depths. And at the Ancient's feet she laid a body,—wan-faced with wide and ghastly eyes. I looked upon the face—and, lo! the face was mine.