On the fourth morning, after a night of storm, all was over. That morning once more I could hear the brook’s murmur which had been obliterated by the storm and by thought. The air was clear and gentle in the coomb behind the farm, and all but still after the night of death and of great wind. High up in the drifting rose of dawn the tall trees were swaying their tips as if stirred by memories of the tempest. They made no sound in the coomb with the trembling of their slender length; some were never to sound again, for they lay motionless and prone in the underwood, or hung slanting among neighbour branches, where they fell in the night--the rabbits could nibble at crests which once wavered about the stars. The path was strewn with broken branches and innumerable twigs. The silence was so great that I could hear, by enchantment of the ears, the departed storm. Yet the tragic repose was unbroken. One robin singing called up the roars and tumults that had to cease utterly before his voice could gain this power of peculiar sweetness and awe and make itself heard. The mountains and sky, beautiful as they were, were more beautiful because a cloak of terror had been lifted from them and left them free to the dark and silver, and now rosy, dawn. The masses of the mountains were still heavy and sombre, but their ridges and the protruding tower bit sharply into the sky; the uttermost peaks appeared again, dark with shadows of clouds of a most lustrous whiteness that hung like a white forest, very far off, in the country of the sun. Seen out of the clear gloom of the wood this country was as a place to which a man might wholly and vainly desire to go, knowing that he would be at rest there and there only. As I listened, walking the ledge between precipice and precipice in the coomb, the silence murmured of the departed tempest like a sea-shell. I could hear the dark hills convulsed with a hollow roaring as of an endless explosion. All night the trees were caught up and shaken in the furious air like grasses; the sounds on earth were mingled with those of the struggle in the high spaces of air. Outside the window branches were brandished wildly, and their anger was the more terrible because the voice of it could not be distinguished amidst the universal voice. The sky itself seemed to aid the roar, as the stars raced over it among floes of white cloud, and dark menacing fragments flitted on messages of darkness across the white. I looked out from the death room, having turned away from the helpless, tranquil bed and the still wife, and saw the hillside trees surging under a wild moon, but they were strange and no longer to be recognised, while the earth was heaving and be-nightmared by the storm. It was the awe of that hour which still hung over the coomb, making its clearness so solemn, its silence so pregnant, its gentleness so sublime. How fresh it was after the sick room, how calm after the vain conflict with death.