Willows

Two friends are midway on a canoe trip down the Danube River. Throughout the story Blackwood personifies the surrounding environment-river, sun, wind-and imbues them with a powerful and ultimately threatening character. Most ominous are the masses of dense, desultory, menacing willows, which "e;moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of the horrible."e;