The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne Chapter 27 Page 12

soul, as into the river’s depths, to find her body.

And there, perhaps, she lay, with her face upward, while the shadow of the boat, and my own pale face peering downward, passed slowly betwixt her and the sky!

Once, twice, thrice, I paddled the boat upstream, and again suffered it to glide, with the river’s slow, funereal motion, downward. Silas Foster had raked up a large mass of stuff, which, as it came towards the surface, looked somewhat like a flowing garment, but proved to be a monstrous tuft of water-weeds. Hollingsworth, with a gigantic effort, upheaved a sunken log. When once free of the bottom, it rose partly out of water, — all weedy and slimy, a devilish-looking object, which the moon had not shone upon for half a hundred years, — then plunged again,