2O COUNTRY ESSAYS. 



covered lumps of jelly, till the grateful tide washes them into 

 beauty, or the delesseria seaweed, which opens into a glow of 

 rosy crimson as the flowing wave ruffles its quiet rock-pool. 

 The ebbing and flowing of the tide is in itself a perpetual won- 

 der, the first intimation to his budding intellect of the vast 

 forces at work around and within our planet. The affluence of 

 the sea in fish and the grotesque forms of some of them, the 

 white-winged birds that circle and call over its waves, may here- 

 after lead his mind to these branches of natural history. The 

 wide circle of heaven which arches over the sea, and the mode 

 in which its tints are reflected upon the watery expanse, bestow 

 endless lessons on the harmonies of colour, even if these in- 

 structions are unconsciously assimilated. But the ships are 

 perhaps the most entrancing of all these influences, with their 

 mysterious departures for strange shores, their white clouds of 

 sun-kissed canvas, the sudden manner in which, after arriving, 

 it may be during his nightly dreams, the child finds them safely 

 anchored in the morning. Their presence intensifies his long- 

 ing for seeing the world, and feeds that passion for adventure, 

 inherent in all English hearts, which led his forefathers to range 

 the deep and claim the supremacy of the seas, and which laid 

 the foundations of our great colonial empire. For this reason 

 those parts of the English coast whence few or no sails can be 

 described are always inferior in interest, at least with masculine 

 minds, to strictly maritime ports and shores. The vastness of 

 the sea, without the counter-balancing spectacle of man's mastery 

 over it, is apt to oppress rather than expand the mind. And if 

 shipping forms a great element in the child's wondering love of 

 the sea, how much more marvellous to him, from being just as 

 full of wonder and yet touching him more familiarly, are boats 1 

 In them he can himself tug at an oar and accompany the fisher- 

 men to their crab-pots, looking over the gunwale at the waving 

 forest of seaweed, Undine's realm, beneath the lustrous swells, 

 and then upwards at the rocks, grim and forbidding in a calm* 



