190 SEA-SIDE STUDIES. 



artist's power of transferring them to our sketch-book. The 

 rocks are entirely of granite ; and the huge wave-worn 

 bouklers, sudden pillars, and piles of broad ledges into 

 which they have been disrupted, give endless variety to 

 their forms. Sometimes they have a castellated aspect, as 

 at " Giant's Castle," on the southern coast — a noble edifice 

 of nature's cunning architecture. Beautiful are the outlines 

 of its topmost grey shelving ledges, softened with shaggy 

 pale-green Byssus-lichen, — beautiful its huge rectangular 

 masses of warm light-brown, blackened here and there with 

 the mysterious beginnings of life, and darkening downwards 

 to the shining deep-brown reefs that jut from the Atlantic 

 waves, which lift their curling masses of crystal greenness 

 into momentary splendour, and then dash, and break, and 

 whirl in milky eddies among the ever-passive rocks. Pas- 

 sive are they ? Yes ; and yet passivity itself is only a 

 slower action, which escapes our notice. The rocks, too, 

 are mutinous with change, could our eyes but follow it. 

 They, too, grow, and change, and die, and give up their 

 substances to the great All, returning whence they came. 

 Changeless they seem, in contrast with the impatient 

 waters ; and yet with reluctant concession they give up 

 their elements to the ambient air, and to the confluent 

 restlessness of water, gradually rounding off their angles, 

 and softening their rugged asperities. Mysterious and beau- 

 tiful law, which ordains that the stubborn skeleton shall 

 take its moulding from the gentle pressure of the softer 

 flesh, as the sterner asperities of life are moulded finally by 

 tenderness and love. 



