"After dinner, they sat at the window of their little parlour, looking out
over the sea, which grew darker and more sullen, ever as the afternoon
declined. The cloudy bank had risen and walled out the sun; but a narrow
space of blue on the horizon looked like the rent whence the wind rushed
forth on the sea, and with the feet of its stormy horses tore up the blue
surface, and scattered the ocean-dust in clouds. As evening drew on,
Herbert could keep in the house no longer. He wandered away on the
heights, keeping from the brow of the cliffs; now and then stooping and
struggling with a stormier eddy; till, descending into a little hollow, he
sunk below the plane of the tempest, and stood in the glow of a sudden
calm, hearing the tumult all round him, but himself in peace. Looking up,
he could see nothing but the sides of the hollow with the sky resting on
them, till, turning towards the sea, he saw, at some distance, a point of
the cliff rising abruptly into the air. At the same moment, the sun looked
out from a crack in the clouds, on the very horizon; and as Herbert could
not see the sunset, the peculiar radiance illuminated the more strangely
the dark vault of earth and cloudy sky. Suddenly, to his astonishment, it
was concentrated on the form of the little ragged girl. She stood on the
summit of the peak before him. The light was a crown, not to her head
only, but to her whole person; as if she herself were the crown set on the
brows of the majestic shore. Disappearing as suddenly, it left her
standing on the peak, dark and stormy; every tress, if tresses they could
be called, of her windy hair, every tatter of her scanty garments, seeming
individually to protest, 'The wind is my playmate; let me go!' If
Aphrodite was born of the sunny sea, this child was the offspring of the
windy shore; as if the mind of the place had developed for itself a
consciousness, and this was its embodiment. She bore a strange affinity to
the rocks, and the sea-weed, and the pools, and the wide, wild ocean; and
Herbert would scarcely have been shocked to see her cast herself from the
cliff into the waves, which now dashed half-way up its height. By the time