OCEAN. 317 



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 out 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 foaming 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 Schiehallion ; and his 

 nummulites and fish lie embedded in great stones of the 

 pyramids, hewn in the times of the old Pharaohs, and in 

 rocky folds of Lebanon still untouched by the tool. So 

 long as Ocean exists there must be disintegration, di- 

 lapidation, change ; and should the time ever arrive when 

 the elevatory agencies, motionless and chill, shall sleep 

 within their profound depths, to awaken no more, and 

 should the sea still continue to impel its currents and to 

 roll its waves, every continent and island would at 

 length disappear, and again, as of old, when " the 

 fountains of the great deep were broken up," 



" A shoreless ocean tumble round the globe." ' 



Of Miller's power as a critic, the passage in this book 

 recounting his visit to the birth-place of Shakspeare, as 

 well as several others, furnish ample proof, and the sketch 

 of the younger Littleton is managed with great adroitness 

 and lightness of touch. There is too much of Shenstone 



