Pages from a Journal with Other Papers eBook

The sky is not uniformly overcast, but is covered with long horizontal folds of cloud, very dark below and a little lighter where they turn up one into the other.  They are incessantly modified by the storm, and fragments are torn away from them which sweep overhead.  The sea, looked at from the height, shows white edges almost to the horizon, and although the waves at a distance cannot be distinguished, the tossing of a solitary vessel labouring to get round the point for shelter shows how vast they are.  The prevailing colour of the water is greyish-green, passing into deep-blue, and perpetually shifting in tint.  A quarter of a mile away the breakers begin, and spread themselves in a white sheet to the land.

A couple of gulls rise from the base of the cliffs to a height of about a hundred feet above them.  They turn their heads to the south-west, and hover like hawks, but without any visible movement of their wings.  They are followed by two more, who also poise themselves in the same way.  Presently all four mount higher, and again face the tempest.  They do not appear to defy it, nor even to exert themselves in resisting it.  What to us below is fierce opposition is to them a support and delight.  How these wonderful birds are able to accomplish this feat no mathematician can tell us.  After remaining stationary a few minutes, they wheel round, once more ascend, and then without any effort go off to sea directly in the teeth of the hurricane.

NOVEMBER

A November day at the end of the month—­the country is left to those who live in it.  The scattered visitors who took lodgings in the summer in the villages have all departed, and the recollection that they have been here makes the solitude more complete.  The woods in which they wandered are impassable, for the rain has been heavy, and the dry, baked clay of August has been turned into a slough a foot deep.  The wind, what there is of it, is from the south-west, soft, sweet and damp; the sky is almost covered with bluish-grey clouds, which here and there give way and permit a dim, watery gleam to float slowly over the distant pastures.  The grass for the most part is greyish-green, more grey than green where it has not been mown, but on the rocky and broken ground there is a colour like that of an emerald, and the low sun when it comes out throws from the projections on the hillside long and beautifully shaped shadows.  Multitudes of gnats in these brief moments of sunshine are seen playing in it.  The leaves have not all fallen, down in the hollow hardly any have gone, and the trees are still bossy, tinted with the delicate yellowish-brown and brown of different stages of decay.  The hedges have been washed clean of the white dust; the roads have been washed; a deep drain has just begun to trickle and on the meadows lie little pools of the clearest rainwater, reflecting with added loveliness any blue patch of the heavens disclosed above them.