rush out along the heights; returning next day, or the same afternoon,
and, without any apology, resuming her studies.

"This holiday was to Herbert one of those seasons which tinge the whole of
the future life. It was a storehouse of sights and sounds and images of
thought; a tiring-room, wherein to clothe the ideas that came forth to act
their parts upon the stage of reason. Often at night, just ere the sleep
that wipes out the day from the overfilled and blotted tablets of the
brain, enwrapped him in its cool, grave-like garments, a vision of the
darkened sea, spotted and spangled with pools of unutterable light, would
rise before him unbidden, in that infinite space for creation which lies
dark and waiting under the closed eyelids. The darkened sea might be but
the out-thrown image of his own overshadowed soul; and the spots of light
the visual form of his hopes. So clearly would these be present to him
sometimes, that when he opened his eyes and gazed into the darkness of his
room, he would see the bright spaces shining before him still. Then he
would fall asleep and dream on about the sea--watching a little cutter
perhaps, as 'she leaned to the lee, and girdled the wave,' flinging the
frolic-some waters from her bows, and parting a path for herself between.
Or he would be seated with the helm in his hand, and all the force and the
joy wherewith she dashed headlong on the rising waves, and half pierced
them and half drove them under her triumphant keel, would be issuing from
his will and his triumph.

"Surely even for the sad despairing waves there is some hope, out in that
boundless room which borders on the sky, and upon which, even in the
gloomiest hour of tempest, falls sometimes from heaven a glory intense.

"So when the time came that the lover of waters must return, he went back
enriched with new visions of them in their great home and motherland, he