nce of my feelings.
My first sense was that of astonishment too intense not to appear unreal
and even amusing. It seemed to me that if I would laugh out loud all
would come back, as delusions yield to scepticism and mockery. But it
was too cold not to be real, the scene and persons were too familiar to
be erroneous. I had to realize that I was in one of the great and
terrible occasional convulsions of human nature. Do you know how it next
affected me? With an instant's sense of sublimity! I said to myself,
'How dared I marry so much beauty and womanly majesty? Doing so, I have
tempted the old gods and their fates and furies. This is poetical
punishment for my temerity.' Still all the while I was laboring at the
one scull left in the boat while my brain was fuming so, and listening
for sounds on the water. I heard the sailor cry twice, and then his
voice fainted away. I began to weep at the oar while I strained upon it,
and called 'Help!' and implored God's intervention. At last I sat down
in the boat, worn out and in despair, and let it drift down all the
city's front, past lights and glooms and floating ice, and wished that I
were dead. My father's kindness and all our disagreements rose to mind,
and it seemed God's punishment that I had married where his intentions
were. Yet to know the truth of this, I said a prayer upon my knees in
the wet boat while my teeth chattered, and before the end of my prayer
had come I was thinking of my wife's pure name, and how this would spot
her as with stains of blood unless I could explain it.

"When I reached this stage of my exalted sensibilities I was nearly
crazed. There had been no witness of our marriage except the minister,
and he was already dead. We had been married at the country parsonage of
an old retired minister beyond Oxford church, on the road from Frankford
town, as we drove out one afternoon, and I prevailed with my
conscientious wife to yield her scruples to our heart's necessity.
'Great God!' I thought aloud--for none could hear me there--'how
dreadfully that secret marriage will compromise my wife! Who will
believe us without a witness of what I must assert--a story so
improbable that I would not believe it myself? I must say that I married
my wife secretly from my father's house, confessing deceit for both of
us, and with Agnes's religious professions, a sin in the church's
estimation. If there could be an excuse for me, the strict people of
Kensington will acco