I felt myself deprived of that which I believe to be one of the most important of the writer's powers, the quick, sure, delicate sense of rhythm; I felt that my sentences became inharmonious. That sense of rhythm was the first cord in my being to snap, broken, inharmonious, over-strained,--ruined. The mighty howling of the Tempest had but one variation, in the weird and strange tones of the winds that pitilessly yet mournfully assailed us. The house in which I was seated was directly in their path; and they therefore assaulted it in utmost fury and apparently on every side at once. Now it was the strong, stern blow of the master, impatient to enter his own house; anon some strong hand tried to dash open the shutters; and again came shrill shrieks down the wide chimneys, wailing for the master's exclusion, fiercely threatening, if we did not admit him, and, at length, furious and mighty attempts to force an entry by dislodging the very roof from its rafters. And all these sounds were occasionally dominated by the sad, deep, melancholy, _Heu, heu! Alas, alas!_ Woe, woe, and Desolation. So immense, so potent, so terrible was that _Heu, heu!_ of chorusing wind and sky, that even the voice of the bold storm-blast seemed to us, in comparison, secondary and mild. At length, the wind managed to clear a way for the rain; our house--I had almost said our craft--began to leak; the roof, opening its seams here and there, admitted the rain in torrents. Still worse, the fury of the Tempest, by a desperate effort, loosened one of the hinges of a shutter, which still remained closed, but from that moment shook, creaked, shrieked, in the most dismal fashion that you can imagine. To make it fast I had to open the window, and that moment that I did so, though sheltered by the shutter, I felt myself in the very centre of the whirlwind, half-deafened by the frightful force of a sound equal to that of a cannon fired close to one's ear. Through the cracks of the shutter I perceived what gave me a clear notion of the tremendous power that was raging landward, skyward, seaward, horizontally, upward, and downward. The waves, meeting and battling, smote each other so fiercely that they could not descend again. Gust after gust from beneath them, carried them landward; mighty and vast as they were, they were borne landward as though so many feathers, by the upheaving force of those mighty blasts.