United States or Uruguay ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He was plainsman enough to realize what suffering those men had passed through before reaching such extremity, and was quick to appreciate the full meaning of their exhaustion, and to sympathize with it. He had passed through a similar baptism, and remembered the desperate clutch of the storm-king.
Soon after the commencement of our story, a fearful storm swept the New England coast. 'Twould seem as if the rage of the storm-king knew no bounds; and many hearts there were made desolate in that long-to-be-remembered September gale.
Content with his wondrous work, the storm-king himself had fled to his far Northern home before the dawn of the Christmas day. Everything was bright and sparkling and beautiful. And most beautiful was the great hymn of praise the forest sang that Christmas morning, the pine-trees and the firs and the vines and the snow-flowers that sang of the prince and of his promised coming.
The storm-king put the brook to bed, and threw a great mantle of snow over him; and the brook that had romped and prattled all the summer and told pretty tales to the grass and flowers, the brook went to sleep too. With all his fierceness and bluster, the storm-king was very kind; he did not awaken the old oak-tree and the slumbering flowers.
Helen's face was still flushed with the glory of her ride with the Storm-King; she smoothed back the long strands of golden hair that had come loose, and then she looked at herself again. "It is dreadful," she said once more, half aloud, "I do not think I ever felt so nervous in my life, and I don't know what to do; everything I did to please him seemed only to make him more miserable.
Before we gained the top of the hill I saw Dan climbing upwards from the old peat track, and I followed dumbly as he led me into an old quarry, long since disused except by the sheep on the warm summer days, and there we lay almost exhausted, content just to know that the storm rushed over our pitiful retreat, and it seems droll to me now that I spoke scarcely above my breath; but then it seemed as though the storm-king might hear me if I raised my voice.
Nor man nor beast ventured forth, save from dire necessity, and it seemed as though the storm-king with his fiercest aspect, and armed with all his terrors, had made a conquest of the city. Wheelwright's left arm was in a sling, and his tattered garments afforded but a sorry protection against the rude peltings of the pitiless storm, of which I have given a very inadequate description.
"You like it!" he exclaimed. "Oh, Arthur, I do!" she cried. "Oh, how glorious you must have been!" And trembling with girlish delight, she took the paper from his hand and placed it in front of her on the music rack. "Oh, I should like to write music for it!" she exclaimed; "for those lines about the Storm-King!"
The storm-king himself rode upon the blast; his horses breathed flames, and his chariot trailed through the air like a serpent of fire. The ash fell before the violence of the storm-king's fury, and the cedars groaning fell, and the hemlocks and the pines; but the oak-tree alone quailed not.
And by and by they came to the region of snow and ice, where the Storm-king holds his court, and reigns in ever-lasting solitude. Looking back, they could see sweet France, lying spread out as a map beneath them, its pleasant fields and its busy towns seeming only as specks in the dim distance.
Word Of The Day