A Rough Shaking by George MacDonald

Without knowing it, he was approaching the sea. Walking along a chain of downs, he saw suddenly from the top of one of them, for the first time in his memory though not in his life, the sea -- a pale blue cloud, as it appeared, far on the horizon, between two low hills. The sight of it, although he did not at first know what it was, brought with it a strange inexplicable feeling of dolorous pleasure. For this he could not account. It was the faintest revival of an all but obliterated impression of something familiar to his childhood, lying somewhere deeper than the memory, which was a blank in regard to it. But that feeling was not all that the sight awoke in him. The pale blue cloud bore to him such a look of the eternal, that it seemed the very place for God to live in -- the solemn, stirless region of calm in which the being to whom now of late he had first begun in reality to pray, kept his abode. The hungry, worn, tattered boy, with nothing to call his own but a great hope and a little dog, fell down on his bare knees on the hard road, and stretched out his hands in an ecstasy toward the low cloud.

The far-off ringing tramp of a horse's feet aroused him. He rose light as an athlete, the great hope grown twice its former size, and hunger forgotten.