Explore "The Debatable Land" by Arthur Willis Colton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
A loud wind blew up the river, cold, sombre, insistent. The river seemed to tremble in waves and shiver in wrinkles under the monotonous threatening of the wind, the stars to be fretful in their bleak spaces. "Forever is a long time." Helen wrapped her cloak more closely.
"Dead!" The wind stated it coldly, insistently, and did not mind how fiercely she denied it. It was only the surface of the river that trembled and glimmered so. The inevitable reality was the current below -- dark, steady, and leading downward to that sea from which the cold wind came with insistent statement. If men and women were incidents to powers beneath and influences over them, like the myriad tiny flickers born of coincidences between the divinity of the stars and the toil of the river; if one only carried for a short time this little torch of courage in a night without horizon; and behind the surface of things "their substance and third dimension," in Gard's phrase, stretched away into a ghostly distance; yet it was inborn in Helen to carry her torch high, to lay lance in rest and challenge the ghostliest shadow in sight, to be herself personal and definite, to accuse even abstractions of personality, to make a vivid world of nearby things and live vividly within it.