I had only that which
was within me. I was only son of only son, and my parents
and grandparents were dead, and my distant kindred cold,
seeing naught of good in so much study and thinking of
that old, dark, beautiful, questionable one, my grandmother.
I had indeed a remote kinsman, head of a convent in this
neighborhood, and he was a wise man and a kindly. But
not he either could do aught here!
All the Jews to be banished, and Don Pedro with a steady
forefinger, "That man--take him, too! Who does not
know that his grandmother was Jewess, and that he lived
with her and drank poison?" But the Dominican, "No!
The Holy Office will take him. You have but to read--only
you must not read--what he has written to see why!"
Gray Ocean, stretching endlessly and now coming close,
were it not well if I drowned myself this gray morning
while I can choose the death I shall die? Now the great
murmur sang _Well_, and now it sang Not well.
Low cliff and heaped sand and a solitary bird wide-winging
toward the mountains of Portugal, and the Ocean gray-
blue and salt! The salt savor entered me, and an inner zest
came forward and said No, to being craven. In banishment
certainly, in the House of the Inquisition more doubtfully,
the immortal man might yet find market from which to buy!
If the mind could surmount, the eternal quest need not be
interrupted--even there!
Blue Ocean sang to me.
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