Explore "A Morning Fancy" by Ambrose Bierce on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I drifted (or I seemed to) in a boat / Upon the surface of a shoreless sea / Whereon no ship nor anything did float, / Save only the frail bark supporting me; / And that -- it was so shadowy -- seemed to be / Almost from out the very vapors wrought / Of the great ocean underneath its keel; / And all that blue profound appeared as naught / But thicker sky, translucent to reveal, / Miles down, whatever through its spaces glided, / Or at the bottom traveled or abided.
Great cities there I saw -- of rich and poor, / The palace and the hovel; mountains, vales, / Forest and field, the desert and the moor, / Tombs of the good and wise who'd lived in jails, / And seas of denser fluid, white with sails / Pushed at by currents moving here and there / And sensible to sight above the flat / Of that opaquer deep. Ah, strange and fair / The nether world that I was gazing at / With beating heart from that exalted level, / And -- lest I founder -- trembling like the devil!