Often she heard the Music of the Marsh through the night: an
infinity of flutings and tinklings made by tiny amphibia,--like
the low blowing of numberless little tin horns, the clanking of
billions of little bells;--and, at intervals, profound tones,
vibrant and heavy, as of a bass viol--the orchestra of the great
frogs! And interweaving with it all, one continuous
shrilling,--keen as the steel speech of a saw,--the stridulous
telegraphy of crickets.

But always,--always, dreaming or awake, she heard the huge blind
Sea chanting that mystic and eternal hymn, which none may hear
without awe, which no musician can learn,--

Heard the hoary Preacher,--El Pregonador,--preaching the ancient
Word, the word "as a fire, and as a hammer that breaketh the
rock in pieces,"--the Elohim--Word of the Sea! ...

Unknowingly she came to know the immemorial sympathy of the mind
with the Soul of the World,--the melancholy wrought by its moods
of gray, the reverie responsive to its vagaries of mist, the
exhilaration of its vast exultings--days of windy joy, hours of
transfigured light.

She felt,--even without knowing it,--the weight of the Silences,
the solemnities of sky and sea in these low regions where all
things seem to dream--waters and grasses with their momentary
wavings,--woods gray-webbed with mosses that drip and
drool,--horizons with their delusions of vapor,--cranes
meditating in their marshes,--kites floating in the high blue....
Even the children were singularly quiet; and their play less