n a church top, with the blue sky and a few
tall pinnacles, and see far below us the steep roofs and foreshortened
buttresses, and the silent activity of the city streets; but how much
more must they not have seemed so to him as he stood, not only above
other men's business, but above other men's climate, in a golden zone
like Apollo's!

This was the sort of pleasure I found in the country of which I write.
The pleasure was to be out of the wind, and to keep it in memory all the
time, and hug oneself upon the shelter. And it was only by the sea that
any such sheltered places were to be found. Between the black worm-eaten
headlands there are little bights and havens, well screened from the
wind and the commotion of the external sea, where the sand and weeds
look up into the gazer's face from a depth of tranquil water, and the
sea-birds, screaming and flickering from the ruined crags, alone disturb
the silence and the sunshine. One such place has impressed itself on my
memory beyond all others. On a rock by the water's edge, old fighting
men of the Norse breed had planted a double castle; the two stood wall
to wall like semi-detached villas; and yet feud had run so high between
their owners, that one, from out of a window, shot the other as he stood
in his own doorway. There is something in the juxtaposition of these two
enemies full of tragic irony. It is grim to think of bearded men and
bitter women taking hateful counsel together about the two hall-fires at
night, when the sea boomed against the foundations and the wild winter
wind was loose over the battlements. And in the study we may reconstruct
for ourselves some pale figure of what life then was. Not so when we are
there; when we are there such thoughts come to us only to intensify a
contrary impression, and association is turned against itself. I
remember walking thither three afternoons in succession, my eyes weary
with being set against the wind, and how, dropping suddenly over the
edge of the down, I found myself in a new world of warmth and shelter.
The wind, from which I had escaped, "as from an enemy," was seemingly
quite local. It carried no clouds with it, and came from such a quarter
that it did not trouble the sea within view. The two castles, black and
ruinous as the rocks about them, were still distinguishable from these
by something more insecure and fantastic in the outline, something that
the last storm had left imminent and the next would demolish