The wind struck us hasty blows, and unawares we borrowed, to describe it,
words fit for the sharp strokes of material things; but the fierce gale
is soft. Along the short grass, trembling and cowering flat on the
scarped hill-side, against the staggering horse, against the flint walls,
one with the rock they grasp, the battery of the tempest is a quick and
enormous softness. What down, what sand, what deep moss, what elastic
wave could match the bed and cushion of the gale?

This storm tossed the wave and the stones of the sea-wall up together.
The next day it left the waters white with the thrilling whiteness of
foam in sunshine. It was only the Channel; and in such narrow waters you
do not see the distances, the wide levels of fleeting and floating foam,
that lie light between long wave and long wave on a Mediterranean coast,
regions of delicate and transitory brightness so far out that all the
waves, near and far, seem to be breaking at the same moment, one beyond
the other, and league beyond league, into foam. But the Channel has its
own strong, short curl that catches the rushing shingle up with the
freshest of all noises and runs up with sudden curves, white upon the
white sea-wall, under the random shadow of sea-gulls and the light of a
shining cloud.




THE DAFFODIL


To travel eastwards and breast the sun, to sail towards the watershed and
breast the floods, to go north and breast the winter--fresh and warm are