It was a fearful struggle: the waves choked him, stunned him, half drowned him; but he hung like mad, and fought to keep his head above the water, while the sea was sweeping him nearer and nearer to the iron shore. He was staring at it wildly, a monstrous enemy with open mouth, and huge jagged teeth that gaped at him. They were looming high above him now; the roaring of the breakers swelled in his ears, in his soul, dazing him, appalling him, poor shivering mite of life that he was. And then suddenly he felt himself sinking--downward, deep down in a valley; he felt himself tossed and rocked, swaying as if in a tree-top; and then upwards he started--higher--higher--right to the boiling crest, the hovering, poising crest. He screamed, he writhed, it was like some hideous nightmare, terrifying to the soul. But the wave seized him--he felt it seize him; and it started--slowly--then faster, then faster yet--with the speed of a cannon ball--and hurled him, smote him, upon the jagged rocks. It battered his face, it broke his limbs, it crushed his skull like an egg-shell; and so the last spark of his hungry life went out of him. XXXVI I share in Ruskin's distrust of the "pathetic fallacy"; and I have no intention of implying that the waves had any sentiments whatever in connection with Robert van Rensselaer. It was purely an accident that they kept him in their grasp, and beat him against the cliff all day; that one by one they rushed up to seize him, and spent all their force in hurling him, in pounding him, until he had lost all semblance of a man; it was not until night, and when the wind died out, that they washed him on down the shore, and sought out a little cove and bore him to the sandy edge. It was a still spot; there was no voice but the waves' voice, and all night long they called to each other on the beach, and tossed the body back and forth in the silver moonlight. When the morning broke it was swollen and purple, and it lay half hidden in the sand.