HISTORY AND THE PARISH 163 



woven snow. They wheeled about the masts of fishing- 

 boats that nodded and kissed and crossed in a steep cove 

 of crags whose black edges were slavered by the foam of 

 the dark sea; and there were no men among the boats or 

 about the grey houses that looked past the walls of the 

 cove to the grim staircase and sea-doors of a black head- 

 land, whose perpendicular rocks stood up far out of the 

 reach of the wings fashioned in the likeness of gigantic 

 idols. The higher crags were bushy and scaly with 

 lichen, and they were cushioned upon thrift and bird's-foot 

 trefoil and white bladder campion. It was a bristling sea, 

 not in the least stormy, but bristling, dark and cold 

 through the slow colourless dawn, dark and cold and 

 immense; and at the edge of it the earth knelt, offering up 

 the music of a small flitting bird and the beauty of small 

 flowers, white and gold, to those idols. They were 

 terrible enough. But the sea was more terrible; for it was 

 the god of whom those rocks were the poor childish 

 images, and it seemed that the god had just then disclosed 

 his true nature and hence the pitiful loveliness of the 

 flowers, the pitiful sweetness of the bird that sang among 

 the rocks at the margin of the kind earth. 



Now and then the sea will startle by some resemblance 

 to the earth. Thus I have come unexpectedly in sight 

 of it on a strange coast and have not known that it was 

 the sea. A gale from the north-east was blowing, and 

 it was late afternoon in mid-winter. The land was sandy 

 moorland, treeless and dark with iron-coloured heather. 

 A mile away I saw rising up into the sky what seemed 

 a peaty mountain in Cardiganshire, as it would be in a 

 tempest of rain, and it was only when I was near the cliff 

 and could see the three long walls of white waves towards 

 M 2 



