A faint perpendicular line of white houses, midway along the range, marked our destination; and far to the westward, the land ended sheer and suddenly at the cliffs of Hartland, the ‘Promontory of Hercules,’ as the old Romans called it, to reappear some ten miles out in the Atlantic, in the blue flat-topped island of Lundy, so exactly similar in height and form to the opposite cape, that it required no scientific imagination to supply the vast gap which the primeval currents had sawn out. There it all lay beneath us like a map; its thousand hues toned down harmoniously into each other by the summer haze, and ‘the eye was not filled with seeing,’ nor the spirit with the intoxicating sight of infinitely various life and form in perfectest repose. I was the first to break the silence. ‘Claude, well-beloved, will you not sketch a little?’ No answer. ‘Not even rhapsodize? call it “lovely, exquisite, grand, majestic”? There are plenty of such words in worldlings’ mouths—not a Cockney but would burst out with some enthusiastic commonplace at such a sight—surely one or other of them must be appropriate.’ ‘Silence, profane! and take me away from this. Let us go down, and hide our stupidities among those sand-hills, and so forget the whole. What use standing here to be maddened by this tantalizing earth-spirit, who shows us such glorious things, and will not tell us what they mean?’ So down we went upon the burrows, among the sands, which hid from us every object but their own chaotic curves and mounds. Above, a hundred skylarks made the air ring with carollings; strange and gaudy plants flecked the waste round us; and insects without number whirred over our heads, or hung poised with their wings outspread on the tall stalks of marram grass. All at once a cloud hid the sun, and a summer whirlwind, presage of the thunderstorm, swept past us, carrying up with it a column of dry sand, and rattling the dry bents over our heads. ‘What a chill, doleful sigh comes from those reeds!’ said Claude. ‘I can conceive this desert, beneath a driving winter’s sky instead of this burning azure, one of the most desolate places on the earth.’ ‘Ay, desolate enough,’ I said, as we walked down beyond the tide-mark, over the vast fields of ribbed and splashy sands, ‘when the dead shells are rolling and crawling up the beach in wreaths before the gale, with a ghastly rattle as of the dry bones in the “Valley of Vision,” and when not a flower shows on that sandcliff, which is now one broad bed of yellow, scarlet, and azure.’