Orlando

 

“He sighed profoundly, and flung himself — there was a passion in his movements which deserves the word — on the earth 
at the foot of the oak tree. He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's spine beneath him; for such he took 
the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding; or the deck 
of a tumbling ship — it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his 
floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening 
about this time when he walked out. To the oak tree he tied it and as he lay there, gradually the flutter in and about him stilled 
itself; the little leaves hung, the deer stopped; the pale summer clouds stayed; his limbs grew heavy on the ground; and he lay so 
still that by degrees the deer stopped nearer and the rooks wheeled round him and the swallows dipped and circled and the 
dragonflies shot past, as if all the fertility and amorous activity of a summer's evening were woven web-like about his body.”

Orlando, Virginia Woolf