Distinct reflections mark the hoarded caves where water has embezzled mountain shapes, and nestling there in eerie miniature a city not unlike our city here: through whose quaint, shivering streets, (it’s colder there, you may not know) the naked burghers of the deep, who move in horizontals, and weirder still, obliques, whose eyes, staring wide, attached to the sides, not the front of the head, see what they pass but not whither they go, who shoot in and out or dive right straight through our houses, as much as to claim: “Your houses are open windows and all windows hoops of fire we circus horses disdain either to see or consider”: or, worse than this, shame our city by feeling it air, not there at all, but a thing unworthy an effort of thought which might disturb the refrain of mouths that open and shut to slow bubbled staves— that they sing while they prance you can judge by the waves! And yet, in spite of all this and much more I could add, I actually beheld on a dav like the present, as clear, one of our species, a man from our town, sit down on a wharf, and cast a long silly line with its sillier hook right into that stream— as if to say, “Look, it’s peopled with fish!”— and not with the world it truly and venerably is, and that, I swear, is a dream!
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