entirely.
It would be difficult to render in words the sense of peace that took
possession of me on these three afternoons. It was helped out, as I
have said, by the contrast. The shore was battered and bemauled by
previous tempests; I had the memory at heart of the insane strife of the
pigmies who had erected these two castles and lived in them in mutual
distrust and enmity, and knew I had only to put my head out of this
little cup of shelter to find the hard wind blowing in my eyes; and yet
there were the two great tracts of motionless blue air and peaceful sea
looking on, unconcerned and apart, at the turmoil of the present moment
and the memorials of the precarious past. There is ever something
transitory and fretful in the impression of a high wind under a
cloudless sky; it seems to have no root in the constitution of things;
it must speedily begin to faint and wither away like a cut flower. And
on those days the thought of the wind and the thought of human life came
very near together in my mind. Our noisy years did indeed seem moments
in the being of the eternal silence: and the wind, in the face of that
great field of stationary blue, was as the wind of a butterfly's wing.
The placidity of the sea was a thing likewise to be remembered. Shelley
speaks of the sea as "hungering for calm," and in this place one learned
to understand the phrase. Looking down into these green waters from the
broken edge of the rock, or swimming leisurely in the sunshine, it
seemed to me that they were enjoying their own tranquillity; and when
now and again it was disturbed by a wind ripple on the surface, or the
quick black passage of a fish far below, they settled back again (one
could fancy) with relief.

On shore too, in the little nook of shelter, everything was so subdued
and still that the least particular struck in me a pleasurable surprise.
The desultory crackling of the whin-pods in the afternoon sun usurped
the ear. The hot, sweet breath of the bank, that had been saturated all
day long with sunshine, and now exhaled it into my face, was like the
breath of a fellow-creature. I remember that I was haunted by two lines
of French verse; in some dumb way they seemed to fit my surroundings and
give expression to the contentment that was in me, and I kept repeating
to myself--

"Mon coeur est un luth suspendu;
Sitot qu'on le touche, il resonne."

I can give no reason why these lines came to me at this time; and for
that v