which gave scarce the shadow of a support, though even that shadow
rested my feet. At one of these moments of stillness, it suddenly
occurred to my perception (what nothing but this slight contact could
have assured me, in the darkness) that I was in a powerful current, and
that this current set _the wrong way_. Instantly a flood of new
intelligence came. Either I had unconsciously turned and was rapidly
nearing the Rebel shore,--a suspicion which a glance at the stars
corrected,--or else it was the tide itself which had turned, and which
was sweeping me down the river with all its force, and was also sucking
away at every moment the narrowing water from that treacherous expanse
of mud out of whose horrible miry embrace I had lately helped to rescue
a shipwrecked crew. Either alternative was rather formidable. I can
distinctly remember that for about one half-minute the whole vast
universe appeared to swim in the same watery uncertainty in which I
floated. I began to doubt everything, to distrust the stars, the line of
low bushes for which I was wearily striving, the very land on which they
grew, if such visionary tiring could be rooted anywhere. Doubts trembled
in my mind like the weltering water, and that awful sensation of _having
one's feet unsupported_, which benumbs the spent swimmer's heart, seemed
to clutch at mine, though not yet to enter it. I was more absorbed in
that singular sensation of nightmare, such as one may feel equally when
lost by land or by water, as if one's own position were all right, but
the place looked for had somehow been preternaturally abolished out of
the universe. At best, might not a man in the water lose all his power
of direction, and so move in an endless circle until he sank exhausted?
It required a deliberate and conscious effort to keep my brain quite
cool. I have not the reputation of being of an excitable temperament,
but the contrary; yet I could at that moment see my way to a condition
in which one might become insane in an instant. It was as if a fissure
opened somewhere, and I saw my way into a mad-house; then it closed, and
everything went on as before. Once in my life I had obtained a slight
glimpse of the same sensation, and then too, strangely enough, while
swimming,--in the mightiest ocean-surge into which I had ever dared
plunge my mortal body. Keats hints at the same sudden emotion, in a wild
poem written among the Scottish mountains. It was not the distinctive
sensati