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,[18] 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.[19] 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,"[20] 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 entirely.  It would be difficult to render in words the sense of peace that took possession of me on these three afternoons.  It was helped out, as I have said, by the contrast.  The shore was battered and bemauled by previous tempests; I had the memory at heart of the insane strife of the pigmies who had erected these two castles and lived in them in mutual distrust and enmity, and knew I had only to put my head out of this little cup of shelter to find the hard wind blowing in my eyes; and yet there were the two great tracts of motionless blue air and peaceful sea looking on, unconcerned and apart, at the turmoil of the present moment and the memorials of the precarious past.  There is ever something transitory and fretful in the impression of a high wind under a cloudless sky; it seems to have no root in the constitution of things; it must speedily begin to faint and wither away like a cut flower.  And on those days the thought of the wind and the thought of human life came very near together in my mind.  Our noisy years did indeed seem moments[21] in the being of the eternal silence:  and the wind, in the face of that great field of stationary blue, was as the wind of a butterfly’s wing.  The placidity of the sea was a thing likewise to be remembered.  Shelley speaks of the sea as “hungering for calm,"[22] and in this place one learned to understand the phrase.  Looking down into these green waters from the broken edge of the rock, or swimming leisurely in the sunshine, it seemed to me that they were enjoying their own tranquillity; and when now and again it was disturbed by a wind ripple on the surface, or the quick black passage of a fish far below, they settled back again (one could fancy) with relief.