t 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 noisy--though she could not have learned the
difference--than the play of city children. Hour after hour, the women
sewed or wove in silence. And the brown men,--always barefooted,
always wearing rough blue shirts,--seemed, when they lounged about the
wharf on idle days, as if they had told each other long ago all they
knew or could ever know, and had nothing more to say. They would stare
at the flickering of the current, at the drifting of clouds and
buzzard:--seldom looking at each other, and always turning their black
eyes again, in a weary way, to sky or sea. Even thus one sees the
horses and the cattle of the coast, seeking the beach to escape the
whizzing flies;--all watch the long waves rolling in, and sometimes
turn their heads a moment to look at one another, but always look back
to the waves again, as if wondering at a mystery....

How often she herself had wondered--wondered at the multiform changes
of each swell as it came in--transformations of tint, of shape, of
motion, that seemed to betoken a life infinitely more subtle than the
strange cold life of lizards and of fishes,--and sinister, and
spectral. Then they all appeared to move in order,--according to one
law or impulse;--each had its own voice, yet all sang one and the same
everlasting song. Vaguely, as she watched them and listened to them,
there came to her the idea of a unity of will in their motion, a unity