to keep the wind away. I lay and thought of ship-wrecks as I listened to it roaring, but I never thought of you, flitting out to sea through it all, cradled so delicately on your mother's back—if that, indeed, was the way of it. How could I imagine it? Even to watch you, as you lay warm on your cold ledge in the daytime, gave me the lumbago, though wrapped in two good plaids. But at night, and with nothing round you, to leave even that shelter, to cast off from the sheer, horrid edge "into the empty, vast, and wandering air," and then souse into yeasty salt water, without cold or chill taken, without a touch of lumbago—oh, what an iron constitution! You are not the lathe painted to look like iron; you are feathers in steel-work, rather, a powder-puff made out of adamant. But here I register a vow that I will return here, some day, in the height of the putting-off season, and see the little guillemots fly from their cliff's cradle, or ride down on one cradle to another—their mother's soft, warm back, and then
In cradle of the rude, imperious surge.
