BY THE SEA-SHORE. 191 



cf the shore are so many and varied that they would require volumes like the present to do 

 them full justice. Here, then, the subject can only be briefly discussed.* 



" The sea-side/' says Gosse, a writer who is both artist and scientist in his powers of 

 description, " is never dull. Other places soon tire us ; we cannot always be admiring 

 scenery, though ever so beautiful, and nobody stands gazing into a field or on a hedgerow bank, 

 though studded with the most lovely flowers, by the half-hour together. But we can and do 

 :stand watching the sea, and feel reluctant to leave it : the changes of the tide and the ever 

 rolling, breaking, and retiring waves are so much like the phenomena of life, that we look on 

 -with an interest and expectation akin to that with which we watch the proceedings of living 

 beings." The sea-shore, in all its varied aspects, has beauties and characteristics all its own. 



" How grandly," says the same writer, " those heavy waves are rolling in upon this long 

 shingle-beach. Onward they come, with an even, deliberate march that tells of power, out of 

 that lowering sky that broods over the southern horizon. Onward they come! onward! onward! 

 each following its precursor in serried ranks, ever coming nearer and nearer, ever looming 

 larger and larger, like the resistless legions of a great invading army, sternly proud in its 

 conscious strength ; and ever and anon, as one and another dark billow breaks in a crest of 

 foam, we may fancy we see the standards and ensigns of the threatening host waving here 

 and there above the mass. 



" Still they drive in, and each in turn curls over its green head, and rushes up the sloping 

 'beach in a long-drawn sheet of the purest, whitest foam. The drifted snow itself is not more 

 purely spotlessly white than is that sheet of foaming water. How it seethes and sparkles ! how it 

 boils and bubbles ! how it rings and hisses ! The wind sings shrilly out of the driving clouds, 

 now sinking to a moan, now rising to a roar ; but we cannot hear it, for its tones are drowned 

 in the ceaseless rushing of the mighty waves upon the beach and the rattle of the recoiling 

 pebbles. Along the curvature of the shore the shrill, hoarse voice runs, becoming softer and 

 mellower as it recedes ; while the echo of the bounding cliffs confines and repeats and mingles 

 it with the succeeding ones till all are blended on the ear in one deafening roar. 



"But let us climb these slippery rocks, and picking our way cautiously over yonder 

 craggy ledges, leaping the chasms that yawn between and reveal the hissing waters below, let 

 us strive to attain the vantage-ground of that ridge which we see some fifty feet above the 

 beach. It is perilous work this scrambling over rocks, alternately slimy with treacherous sea- 

 weed, and bristling with sharp needle-points of honeycombed limestone; now climbing a 

 precipice, with the hands clutching these same rough points, and the toes finding a precarious 

 hold in their interstices ; now descending to a ledge awfully overhung ; now creeping along a 

 narrow shelf by working each foot on a few inches at a time, while the fingers nervously cling 

 to the stony precipice, and the mind strives to forget the rugged depths below, and what would 

 happen if ah! that ' if ! ' let us cast it to the winds. Another long stride across a gulf, a 

 bound upward, and here we are. 



" Yes, here we stand on the bluff, looking out to seaward in the very eye of the 

 wind. We might have supposed it a tolerably smooth slope of stone when we looked at 



* The bulk of this chapter is derived from Philip Henry .Gosse's "Naturalist's Rambles on the Devonshire 

 Coast ; " " Tenby : a Seaside Holiday; " "A Year at the Shore; " the Rev. J. G. Wood's "Comiron Objects of the 

 Sea-shore;" and Madame de Gasparin's charming idyl, " By the Sea-shore." 



