You
can hardly call her a corpse, though the human beings who inhabited
her, and were her soul, may have fled into the far eternities; and so
we felt that night, as we came down along the woodland road, with the
north-west wind hurling dead branches and showers of crisp oak-leaves
about our heads; till suddenly, as we staggered out of the wood, we
came upon such a piece of chiaroscuro as would have baffled
Correggio, or Rembrandt, himself. Under a wall was a long tent of
sails and spars, filled with Preventive men, fishermen, Lloyd's
underwriters, lying about in every variety of strange attitude and
costume; while candles, stuck in bayonet-handles in the wall, poured
out a wild glare over shaggy faces and glittering weapons, and piles
of timber, and rusty iron cable, that glowed red-hot in the light,
and then streamed up the glen towards us through the salt misty air
in long fans of light, sending fiery bars over the brown transparent
oak foliage and the sad beds of withered autumn flowers, and
glorifying the wild flakes of foam, as they rushed across the light-
stream, into troops of tiny silver angels, that vanished into the
night and hid themselves among the woods from the fierce spirit of
the storm.
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