28 SEA-SIDE STUDIES. 



sails dot the blue breadth before us. Out there on the 

 strip of sand in the creek, a row of lazy gulls, motion- 

 less as stones, and looking like them, seem as if they 

 too were resting from their hunt. A sense of pleasant 

 weariness gives its dreamy calmness to the scene. "We 

 are silent, or wander into idlest chat, as if we had fairly 

 reached thsft land 



"Wherein it seemed always afternoon." 



It was enough that our glance should fall upon the 

 stealthy sea, and follow wave after wave as each grew 

 out of the swell and ran along, a curling line of foam, 

 to plunge upon the shore. We wanted nothing more. 

 There is a peculiar charm about the sea ; it is always 

 the same, yet never monotonous. Mr Gosse has well 

 observed, that you soon get tired of looking at the 

 loveliest field, but never of the rolling waves. The 

 secret, perhaps, is that the field does not seem alive ; 

 the sea is life-abounding. Profoundly mysterious as 

 the field is, with its countless forms of life, the aspect 

 does not irresistibly and at once coerce the mind to 

 think of subjects mysterious and awful — it carries with 

 it no ineradicable associations of terror and awe, such 

 as are borne in every murmur of old ocean — and thus 

 is neither so terrible nor so suggestive. As we look 

 from the clifis, every wave has its history ; every swell 

 keeps up suspense — will it break now, or will it melt 

 into that larger wave ? And the log which floats so 

 aimlessly on the wave, and now is carried under again 

 like a drowning wretch, — is it the fragment of some 

 ship which has struck miles and miles away, fai- from 



