But in two things his power of observation was unsurpassed, I think we may almost say, unrivalled: in sound, and in movement. For these he had what he describes in his sailor-brother,
“a watchful heart
Still couchant, an inevitable ear,
And an eye practiced like a blind man’s touch.”
In one of his juvenile poems, a sonnet describing the stillness of the world at twilight, he says:
“Calm is all nature as a resting wheel;
The kine are couched upon the dewy grass,
The horse alone seen dimly as I pass,
Is cropping audibly his evening meal.”
At nightfall, while he is listening to the hooting of the owls and mocking them, there comes an interval of silence, and then