For this world's peace to pray;
For, as love's wild prayer dissolved in air,
Her woman's heart gave way!
But the sin forgiven by Christ in heaven
By man is cursed alway.



NAHANT.

Here we are, then, in the "Swallow's Cave." The floor descends by a
gentle declivity to the sea, and from the long dark cleft stretching
outward you look forth upon the Atlantic--the shore of Ireland the
first _terra firma_ in the path of your eye. Here is a dark pool, left
by the retreating tide for a refrigerator; and with the champagne in
the midst we will recline about it like the soft Asiatics of whom we
learned pleasure in the East, and drink to the small-featured and
purple-lipped "Mignons" of Syria--those fine-limbed and fiery slaves
adorable as peris, and by turns languishing and stormy, whom you buy
for a pinch of piastres (say 5L 5s.) in sunny Damascus. Your drowsy
Circassian, faint and dreamy, or your crockery Georgian--fit dolls for
the sensual Turk--is, to him who would buy _soul_, dear at a penny the
hecatomb.

We recline, as it were, in an ebon pyramid with a hundred feet of floor
and sixty of wall, and the fourth side open to the sky. The light
comes in mellow and dim, and the sharp edges of the rocky portal seem
let into the pearly heaven. The tide is at half-ebb, and the advancing
and retreating waves, which at first just lifted the fringe of crimson
dulse at the lip of the cavern, now dash their spray-pearls on the rock