carrying up with it a column of dry sand, and rattling the dry bents
over our heads.

'What a chill, doleful sigh comes from those reeds!' said Claude. 'I
can conceive this desert, beneath a driving winter's sky instead of
this burning azure, one of the most desolate places on the earth.'

'Ay, desolate enough,' I said, as we walked down beyond the tide-
mark, over the vast fields of ribbed and splashy sands, 'when the
dead shells are rolling and crawling up the beach in wreaths before
the gale, with a ghastly rattle as of the dry bones in the "Valley of
Vision," and when not a flower shows on that sandcliff, which is now
one broad bed of yellow, scarlet, and azure.'

'That is the first spot in England,' said Claude, 'except, of course,
"the meads of golden king-cups," where I have seen wild flowers give
a tone to the colouring of the whole landscape, as they are said to
do in the prairies of Texas. And look how flowers and cliff are both
glowing in a warm green haze, like that of Cuyp's wonderful sandcliff
picture in the Dulwich Gallery,--wonderful, as I think, and true, let
some critics revile it as much as they will.'

'Strange, that you should have quoted that picture here; its curious
resemblance to this very place first awoke in me, years ago, a living
interest in landscape-painting. But look there; even in these grand
summer days there is a sight before us sad enough. There are the
ribs of some ill-fated ship, a man-of-war too, as the story goes,
standing like black fangs, half-buried in the sand. And off what are
those two ravens rising, stirring up with their obscene wings a
sickly, putrescent odour? A corpse?'