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Her face was sharp, her eyes black and snake-like, while her brow was channelled into deep furrows which made you think it almost impossible that she had ever been young or handsome.
Here is the village, the little church, the ugly column to Petrarch's memory, the inn, with its caricatures of Laura, and its excellent trout, the bridge and the many-flashing, eddying Sorgues, lashed by millwheels, broken by weirs, divided in its course, channelled and dyked, yet flowing irresistibly and undefiled.
These dark channelled rocks, worn, as with eternal tears, these traces, so evident of ancient and vast desolations, suggest the idea of boundless power and inexorable will, before whose course the most vehement of human feelings are as the fine spray of the cataract.
It is another sound they hear a low booming as of distant thunder. And that black thing away on their right scarcely visible over the darkened waves is that the channelled and sea-bird haunted Staffa, trembling through all her caves under the shock of the smooth Atlantic surge?
Over it is a Baptism of Christ, with God the Father and the Dove above. Within is a frieze of putti bearing garlands, with shell-head niches and channelled pilasters below. Above this is a band of Venetian-Gothic leaves, and in the coffered ceiling are rosettes. This ceiling is a pointed wagon vault, cut from two great blocks of marble, which meet in the centre.
Ever and again the tempest snatched little whiffs from the channelled edges, twirled them round and made them dance over the chime of the monster pile, then let them lie like herring-bones, or the seams of sand where the tide has been.
The floor of it is of rich mosaic, encompassed by a low seat of red marble, and its walls are of alabaster, but worn and shattered, and darkly stained with age, almost a ruin, in places the slabs of marble have fallen away altogether, and the rugged brickwork is seen through the rents, but all beautiful; the ravaging fissures fretting their way among the islands and channelled zones of the alabaster, and the time-stains on its translucent masses darkened into fields of rich golden brown, like the color of seaweed when the sun strikes on it through deep sea.
Rude as he was, her voice may not always have been meaningless for one who knew her haunts so well; deep recesses where, veiled in foliage, some wild shy rivulet steals with timid music through breathless caves of verdure; gulfs where feathered crags rise like castle walls, where the noonday sun pierces with keen rays athwart the torrent, and the mossed arms of fallen pines cast wavering shadows on the illumined foam; pools of liquid crystal turned emerald in the reflected green of impending woods; rocks on whose rugged front the gleam of sunlit waters dances in quivering light; ancient trees hurled headlong by the storm to dam the raging stream with their forlorn and savage ruin; or the stern depths of immemorial forests, dim and silent as a cavern, columned with innumerable trunks, each like an Atlas upholding its world of leaves, and sweating perpetual moisture down its dark and channelled rind; some strong in youth, some grisly with decrepit age, nightmares of strange distortion, gnarled and knotted with wens and goitres; roots intertwined beneath like serpents petrified in an agony of contorted strife; green and glistening mosses carpeting the rough ground, mantling the rocks, turning pulpy stumps to mounds of verdure, and swathing fallen trunks as, bent in the impotence of rottenness, they lie outstretched over knoll and hollow, like moldering reptiles of the primeval world, while around, and on and through them, springs the young growth that fattens on their decay the forest devouring its own dead.
Down at her right hand, bordering a water, stood a sallow, a dead tree, channelled inside with the brown trail of a goat-moth. Looking in this direction, she saw Cornelia advancing to the tree. When the lady had reached it, she drew a little book from her bosom, kissed it, and dropped it in the hollow. This done, she passed among the firs.
He would show us the English upper and middle class, shaken out of its comfort and complacency, its easy and patronizing security, by the shock of war and bereavement, facing a future of unknown and terrifying ideas and forces, with the brutal tax-gatherer administering the coup de grâce to its equanimity: the working class, called to fight for a cause which it but dimly understood, in the hope of a new world which victory was to call into being, exhorted by the nation's leaders to be as daring in its home policies as in the trenches, and then confronted with a world of failing markets and impoverished customers and with the full rigour of the merciless laws of supply and demand which, just because it had wished them out of existence, it had grown accustomed to believe could be ignored, oscillating, according to age, temperament or experience, between resignation and impotent fury, between old-fashioned trade-unionism and the latest fashion in extremism: France, emerging nerve-racked from a fifty years' obsession and a five years' nightmare, half-dead with sorrow and suspense, yet too proud in victory to own her weakness, looking round, half-defiant, half-wistful, among her allies for one who can understand her unspoken need, and longing, with all the intensity of her sensitive nature, to be able to resume, in security and quietness of mind, the arts and activities of normal life in which she has been, and will be again, the Athens of the modern world: Germany, tougher in fibre than her western neighbour yet equally shaken and exhausted: a land of sheep without a shepherd, rushing hither and thither seeking for a direction and a Weltanschauung, her amazing powers of industry and concentration and her rich and turbid life of feeling running to waste for lack of channelled guidance: Belgium, self-confident, industrious and rejuvenated: Italy, made one at last and measuring her strength to face the tasks of a new epoch in her history: and, behind, the great new surging world of the Slav, from the disciplined enthusiasm of Prague, under her philosopher-president, to the birth-agonies of a new Russia in the grip of the rough tyrant-physicians of the Kremlin.
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