334 The Ocean, 



sward, and look down through the half-shut eye, as the 

 clouds sailed slowly athwart the landscape, on an appari- 

 tion of this departed sea, now in sunshine, now in shadow. 

 Adventurous keel had never ploughed it, nor had human 

 dwelling arisen on its shores ; but I could see, amid its deep 

 blue, as the light flashed out amain, the white gleam of wings 

 around the dark tumbling of the whale and the grampus ; 

 and now, as the shadows rested on it dim and sombre, a huge 

 shoal of ice-floes came drifting drearily from the north, the 

 snow-laden rack brushing their fractured summits, and the 

 stormy billows chafing angrily below. 



** Was it the sound of the distant surf that was in mine ears 

 or the low moan of the breeze, as it crept through the neigh- 

 bouring wood % 0, that hoarse voice of ocean, never silent 

 since time first began, where has it not been uttered ! There 

 is stillness amid the calm of the arid rainless desert, where 

 no spring rises and no streamlet flows, and the long caravan 

 plies its weary march, amid the blinding glare of the sand, 

 and the red unshaded rays of the fierce sun. But once and 

 again, and yet again, has the roar of ocean been there. It 

 is his sands that the winds heap up ; and it is the skeleton 

 remains of his vassals — shells and fish, and the stony coral — 

 that the rocks underneath enclose. There is silence on the 

 tall mountain peak, with its glittering mantle of snow, where 

 the panting lungs labour to inhale the thin bleak air, where no 

 insect murmurs, and no bird flies, and where the eye wanders 

 over multitudinous hill-tops that lie far beneath, and vast 

 dark forests that sweep on to the distant horizon, and along 

 long hollow valleys, where the great rivers begin. And yet 

 once and again, and yet again, has the roar of ocean been 

 there. The effigies of his more ancient denizens we find 

 sculptured on the crags, where they jut from beneath the ice 

 into the mist wreath ; and his later beaches, stage beyond 

 stage, terrace the descending slopes. Where has the great 

 destroyer not been, the devourer of continents, the blue foam- 

 ing dragon, whose vocation it is to eat up the land ? His ice- 

 floes have alike furrowed the flat steppes of Siberia and the 

 rocky flanks of Schehallion ; and his nummulites and fish lie 

 embedded in great stones of the pyramids, hewn in the times 



