clouds than there were depths below them. . . There had been a wind all
day; and it was rising then with an extraordinary great sound . . . Long
before we saw the sea, its spray was on our lips . . . The water was out
over the flat country, and every sheet and puddle lashed its banks, and
had its stress of little breakers. When we came within sight of the sea,
the waves on the horizon, caught at intervals above the boiling abyss,
were like glimpses of another shore, with towers and buildings. . . The
people came to their doors all aslant, and with streaming hair." David
dreams of a cannonade, when at last he "fell--off a tower and down a
precipice--into the depths of sleep." In the morning, "the wind might
have lulled a little, though not more sensibly than if the cannonading I
had dreamed of had been diminished by the silencing of half a dozen guns
out of hundreds." "It went from me with a shock, like a ball from a
rifle," says David in another place, after the visit of a delirious
impulse; here is the volley of departure, the shock of passion vanishing
more perceptibly than it came.

The tempest in _David Copperfield_ combines Dickens's dramatic tragedy
of narrative with his wonderful sense of sea and land. But here are
landscapes in quietness: "There has been rain this afternoon, and a
wintry shudder goes among the little pools in the cracked, uneven flag-
stones. . . Some of the leaves, in a timid rush, seek sanctuary within
the low-arched cathedral door; but two men coming out resist them, and
cast them out with their feet:" The autumn leaves fall thick, "but never
fast, for they come circling down with a dead lightness." Again, "Now
the woods settle into great masses as if they were one profound tree."
And yet again, "I held my mother in my embrace, and she held me in hers;
and among the still woods in the silence of the summer day there seemed
to be nothing but our two troubled minds that was not at peace." Yet,
with a thousand great felicities of diction, Dickens had no _body_ of