the dog. Sprinkled at his feet were emerald lights: hundreds of glow-
worms studded the dark dry ground.

He sat and eyed them, thinking not at all. His energies were expended in
action. He sat as a part of the ruins, and the moon turned his shadow
Westward from the South. Overhead, as she declined, long ripples of
silver cloud were imperceptibly stealing toward her. They were the van
of a tempest. He did not observe them or the leaves beginning to
chatter. When he again pursued his course with his face to the Rhine, a
huge mountain appeared to rise sheer over him, and he had it in his mind
to scale it. He got no nearer to the base of it for all his vigorous
outstepping. The ground began to dip; he lost sight of the sky. Then
heavy, thunder-drops streak his cheek, the leaves were singing, the earth
breathed, it was black before him, and behind. All at once the thunder
spoke. The mountain he had marked was bursting over him.

Up startled the whole forest in violet fire. He saw the country at the
foot of the hills to the bounding Rhine gleam, quiver, extinguished.
Then there were pauses; and the lightning seemed as the eye of heaven,
and the thunder as the tongue of heaven, each alternately addressing him;
filling him with awful rapture. Alone there--sole human creature among
the grandeurs and mysteries of storm--he felt the representative of his
kind, and his spirit rose, and marched, and exulted, let it be glory, let
it be ruin! Lower down the lightened abysses of air rolled the wrathful
crash; then white thrusts of light were darted from the sky, and great
curving ferns, seen steadfast in pallor a second, were supernaturally
agitated, and vanished. Then a shrill song roused in the leaves and the
herbage. Prolonged and louder it sounded, as deeper and heavier the
deluge pressed. A mighty force of water satisfied the desire of the
earth. Even in this, drenched as he was by the first outpouring, Richard