The Wreck of the Corsaire by W. Clark Russell

The day passed, the light breeze lingered, but it brought nothing into sight. I would think as I sent my glance along the naked, sea-swept, desolate deck, gaunt and skeleton-like, with its ragged exhibition of splintered plank and crushed bulwark, that had there been a mast left in the hull I might from the summit of it be able to see the _Ruby_, whose topmost cloths lay sunk behind the horizon to the eyes which I levelled from the low side of the wreck. "Oh! " I would cry aloud, "if I could but be sure that she was near me though hidden! " Maddening as the expectation might have been which the sight of her afar would have raised in me, yet the mere having her in view, no matter how dim, deceptive a speck she proved, would have taken a deal of the bitterness, the heart-subduing feeling of hopelessness out of the wild and awful sense of desolation that possessed me.

The sun sank; with the telescope trembling in my hands I made a slow, painful circle of the ocean whilst the western magnificence lay upon it, and then let fall the glass and fell into the chair, and with bowed head and tightly-folded arms, and eyes closed to mitigate by the shadowing of the lids the anguish of the fires which despair had kindled in them -- for my heart was parched, no relief of tears came to me -- I waited for the darkness of a second night to settle down upon the wreck. But on this day the gloom fell with the brilliance of stars, and some time after eight the moon rose, a moist, purple shield, at whose coming the light draught of wind died out and the ocean flattened into a breathless, polished surface. When presently the moon had soared and whitened, the sea looked as wide again as it was to the showering of her light, brimming the atmosphere with a delicate silver haze; indeed there went a shadowing round about its confines to the shaft of moonlight on the water that made it seem hollow where the wreck lay, and it was like floating in the vastness of the firmament that bent over it to glance over the side of the hull and see the mirror-like breast studded with reflections of the larger stars, and to follow the shadow of the deep, curled at the extremities as it seemed, to the tropic astral dust that twinkled there like dew trembling to the breath of a summer night wind.