he deafening crack, and
followed by the appalling roar and roll of the thunder. Nor was it
noise alone that surrounded him, for, as if he were in the heart and
nest of the storm, the very wind-waves that made the thunder rushed
in driven bellowing over him, and had nearly swept him away. He
clung to the rock with hands and feet. The cloud writhed and
wrought and billowed and eddied, with all the shapes of the wind,
and seemed itself to be the furnace-womb in which the thunder was
created. Was this then the voice into which the silence had been
all the time deepening?--had the Presence thus taken form and
declared itself? Gibbie had yet to learn that there is a deeper
voice still into which such a silence may grow--and the silence not
be broken. He was not dismayed. He had no conscience of wrong, and
scarcely knew fear. It was an awful delight that filled his spirit.
Mount Sinai was not to him a terror. To him there was no wrath in
the thunder any more than in the greeting of the dog that found him
in his kennel. To him there was no being in the sky so righteous as
to be more displeased than pitiful over the wrongness of the
children whom he had not yet got taught their childhood. Gibbie sat
calm, awe-ful, but, I imagine, with a clear forehead and
smile-haunted mouth, while the storm roared and beat and flashed and
ran about him. It was the very fountain of tempest. From the bare
crest of the mountain the water poured down its sides, as if its
springs were in the rock itself, and not in the bosom of the cloud
above. The tumult at last seized Gibbie like an intoxication; he
jumped to his feet, and danced and flung his arms about, as if he
himself were the storm. But the uproar did not last long. Almost
suddenly it was gone, as if, like a bird that had been flapping the
ground in agony, it had at last recovered itself, and taken to its
great wings and flown. The sun shone out clear, and in all the blue
abyss not a cloud was to be seen, except far away to leeward, where
one was spread like a banner in the lonely air, fleeting away, the
ensign of the charging storm--bearing for its device a segment of
the many-coloured bow.

And now that its fierceness was over, the jubilation in the softer
voices of the storm became audible. As the soul gives thanks for
the sufferings that are overpast, offering the love and faith and
hope which the pain has stung into fresh life, so from the sides of
the mountain ascend