There Is Something, To My
Fancy, Quite Perfect In This Little Experience Of My Fellow-
Traveller's. The Ways Of Men
Seem always very trivial to us when
we find ourselves alone on a church-top, with the blue sky and
A
few tall pinnacles, and see far below us the steep roofs and
foreshortened buttresses, and the silent activity of the city
streets; but how much more must they not have seemed so to him as
he stood, not only above other men's business, but above other
men's climate, in a golden zone like Apollo's!
This was the sort of pleasure I found in the country of which I
write. The pleasure was to be out of the wind, and to keep it in
memory all the time, and hug oneself upon the shelter. And it was
only by the sea that any such sheltered places were to be found.
Between the black worm-eaten head-lands there are little bights and
havens, well screened from the wind and the commotion of the
external sea, where the sand and weeds look up into the gazer's
face from a depth of tranquil water, and the sea-birds, screaming
and flickering from the ruined crags, alone disturb the silence and
the sunshine. One such place has impressed itself on my memory
beyond all others. On a rock by the water's edge, old fighting men
of the Norse breed had planted a double castle; the two stood wall
to wall like semi-detached villas; and yet feud had run so high
between their owners, that one, from out of a window, shot the
other as he stood in his own doorway. There is something in the
juxtaposition of these two enemies full of tragic irony. It is
grim to think of bearded men and bitter women taking hateful
counsel together about the two hall-fires at night, when the sea
boomed against the foundations and the wild winter wind was loose
over the battlements. And in the study we may reconstruct for
ourselves some pale figure of what life then was. Not so when we
are there; when we are there such thoughts come to us only to
intensify a contrary impression, and association is turned against
itself. I remember walking thither three afternoons in succession,
my eyes weary with being set against the wind, and how, dropping
suddenly over the edge of the down, I found myself in a new world
of warmth and shelter. The wind, from which I had escaped, 'as
from an enemy,' was seemingly quite local. It carried no clouds
with it, and came from such a quarter that it did not trouble the
sea within view. The two castles, black and ruinous as the rocks
about them, were still distinguishable from these by something more
insecure and fantastic in the outline, something that the last
storm had left imminent and the next would demolish entirely. It
would be difficult to render in words the sense of peace that took
possession of me on these three afternoons.
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