The wind struck us hasty blows, and unawares we borrowed, to describe it, words fit for the sharp strokes of material things; but the fierce gale is soft.  Along the short grass, trembling and cowering flat on the scarped hill-side, against the staggering horse, against the flint walls, one with the rock they grasp, the battery of the tempest is a quick and enormous softness.  What down, what sand, what deep moss, what elastic wave could match the bed and cushion of the gale?

This storm tossed the wave and the stones of the sea-wall up together.  The next day it left the waters white with the thrilling whiteness of foam in sunshine.  It was only the Channel; and in such narrow waters you do not see the distances, the wide levels of fleeting and floating foam, that lie light between long wave and long wave on a Mediterranean coast, regions of delicate and transitory brightness so far out that all the waves, near and far, seem to be breaking at the same moment, one beyond the other, and league beyond league, into foam.  But the Channel has its own strong, short curl that catches the rushing shingle up with the freshest of all noises and runs up with sudden curves, white upon the white sea-wall, under the random shadow of sea-gulls and the light of a shining cloud.

THE DAFFODIL

To travel eastwards and breast the sun, to sail towards the watershed and breast the floods, to go north and breast the winter—­fresh and warm are the energies of such bracing action; but more animating still is it to live so as to breast the stress of time.

Man and woman may, like the child, or almost like him, fill the time and enlarge the capacity of the day—­our poor day that so easily shrinks and dwindles in the careless possession of idle minds.  The date, every first of March, for example, may sweep upon a large curve and come home annually after a swinging flight.  To the infinite variety of natural days may be entrusted half the work of strengthening the flight against time, but the other half must be the task of the vehement heart.  Nature assuredly does not fail.  Days, seasons, and years are as wide asunder as the unforeseen can set them, and a crowd of children is not more various.  But the resisting heart seems of late to be somewhat lacking.  We are inclined to turn our heel upon the East, upon the watershed, upon the gates of the wind, and to go the smooth road.

We are even precipitate, and whip our way faster on the time-killing course than the natural event would take us.  It is not enough that we should run helplessly, we outstrip the breeze and outsail the current with the ease of our untimely luxuries.  Our daffodils are no longer to have the praise of their daring, for we no longer relate them to the lagging swallow.  By the time the barely budding woods give a poor man’s lodging to the cold daffodil—­a scanty kind taking the wind with