Personal Pleasures Read Online Free PDF Page A

guide it to the nearest island, scoop a hole for it in the sand and fill it with water; it swims round and round,goblin eyes seeking escape; it feels its position acutely; it must be turned adrift again into the Florida seas, to join its goblin kind.
    The boat that lies tethered to a mangrove tree on one of the islands is unmoored; one rows her back, while the others wade beside, shoving her over the sandy shallows, to beach her on the palm-fringed Key, where the evening breeze goes rustling among the star-shaped heads of slender, leaning royal palms, and the small waves shuffle sighing on white sand.
    It has been a lovely bathe, an exquisite wade, an immersion, however partial, in enchanted waters. Nevertheless, of all the world’s uneasy beds on which to tread, on which to sit, a bed of coral is the least deserving of that name. Of what is the marine cœlenterate polyps thinking, that he builds him of the skeletons of his tribe such harsh, such jagged arborescent beds for his habitation?
    Rise, rise, and heave thy rosie head
    From thy coral-pav’n bed.…
    One is happy to know that the spirit was here mistaken, and that dear Sabrina, sitting under the glassy, cool, translucent wave of the Severn, was not sitting on coral, nor, as his excited fancy elsewhere tries to make out, on diamond rocks. We may be sure that Sabrina’s bed and seats were of Severn mud, and fortunate she was that this was so. She would have said, I think, with Clive, and with all who have wadedsandal-less off the Florida Keys, “I have no desire for coral.”
2.
Off the Ligurian Coast
    The sea’s warm edge sways lisping on hot sand, curling into tiny ripples, hissing, creaming, running delicately back. Wade in, take five steps in water as warm as a tepid bath, and the sharply shelving beach fails beneath your feet and leaves you swimming. Lapped in the clear, thin stuff, so blue, so buoyant, so serene, you can conceive no reason for ever leaving it. Strange element, on which you may lie stretched full length as on a bed, eyes closed, the sun hot on your face, wriggling your spread hands now and then like fins to propel you; or you may stand upright with folded arms, treading the sea with your feet; or hurl yourself through the water arm over arm; or dive down to the bottom of the deep, gather a handful of seaweed or pebbles, and shoot up. You may start swimming out to sea, heading for Corsica; swim and swim, until you are suddenly afraid you will meet a shark, and turn and race panicking for shore. Yes, there have been sharks in our bay; we have never met one, but we sometimes fear that we may.
    Often we take out the canoe when we bathe. Three sit in the middle and one on each end, when it capsizes, we ride astride on its backside. Oh, pleasure, reeling goddess, I have spent much time with you, but I think that while bathing of an August afternoon in ourbay with the canoe, we know you at your most reeling, your most zoneless. Such felicity seems to know no limit; measureless to man, it seems the pleasure of some celestial state, in which we swim and sport in the blue and heavenly inane, like the
putti
that leap through wreaths of flowers upon a painted ceiling.
    Such pleasure, I say, like the pleasures of paradise, should know no term; it should endure for ever. But to our bathing a term is set. Unlike the children of the Italian
bagnanti
, we are summoned from the sea. We leave that lovely, that clear and celestial element, for thin air quivering with heat.
3.
In the Cam
    The birds wake me; many minds with but a single thought, they all break out singing at once; one does not know why. They wake me; they would wake the dead, if the dead lay where I lie, in an open arbour in a little wood by the river’s edge. The river, pale and secret, slides past, between the green shadow of willows and the grey light of dawn and the white shining of the hanging may-bushes and the deep green of the waving weeds. It flows towards