"
Now a fourth began:
"Thus sang Denise, what while the siccant sheets and coverlets that
pillowed kingly dreams, with curious undergarbs of royalty, she neatly
ranged: and dreamed not of that doom which waited, yet unborn, to strike
men dumb with perfect awe. As when the seventh wave poises, and sunlight
cleaves it through and through with gold, as though to gild oncoming
death for him that sees foredoomed--and, gasping, sees death high and
splendid!--while the tall wave bears down, and its shattering makes an
end of him: thus poised the sable bird while one might count one, two,
and three, and four, and five, and six, but hardly seven--"
So they continued; but Manuel listened to no more. "What is the meaning
of all this?" he asked, of Freydis.
"It is an experimental incantation," she replied, "in that it is a bit
of unfinished magic for which the proper words have not yet been found:
but between now and a while they will be stumbled on, and then this rune
will live perpetually, surviving all those rhymes that are infected with
thought and intelligent meanings such as are repugnant to human nature.
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