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 very cause I repeat them here. For all I know, they may
serve to complete the impression in the mind of the reader, as they
were certainly a part of it for me.
And this happened to me in the place of all others where I liked
least to stay. When I think of it I grow ashamed of my own
ingratitude.
