The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail
And you are stay'd for. There; my blessing with thee.
Hamlet. I do not set my life at a pin's fee...
It waves me forth again: I'll follow it.
Horatio. What if it tempt you toward the flood?...
Look whether he has not changed his colour.
—Hamlet.
THE sounds of wild harp-music were ascending at even from the depths of Glenmara. The sun had sunk, and the hues that had been woven round the west were wasting themselves away on the horizon. The faint shell-pink had drifted and dwindled far from the place of sunset. The woods of the slopes looked very dark now that the red glances from the west were withdrawn from their glossy foliage; but the heather-swathed mountains, towering through the soft blue air to the dark blue sky, were richly purple, as though the sunset hues had become entangled amongst the heather, and had forgotten to fly back to the west that had cast them forth.
The little tarn at the foot of the lowest crags was black and still, waiting for the first star-glimpse, and from its marge came the wild notes of a harp fitfully swelling and waning; and then arose the still wilder and more melancholy tones of a man's voice chanting what seemed like a weird dirge to the fading twilight, and the language was the Irish Celtic—that language every song of which sounds like a dirge sung over its own death:—
Why art thou gone from us, White Dove of the Irish