Sea Sands 167 



the Humber and the Skaw the North Sea has the 

 characteristic aspect and scenery of a half-inland 

 water, and little of the eternal fixity which marks 

 the ocean deeps. Standing beneath the cliffs at 

 Dunwich we can see the young woods and last 

 harvest's cornfields sinking rib by rib to the beach, 

 and skulls of an eighteenth-century churchyard 

 washed out by the tides. Such a scene for a moment 

 does even more violence to our sense of nature than 

 of humanity ; if the sea itself can be so meagre 

 and shifting, the world seems undermined at its 

 roots. Yet this erosion of the earthy Suffolk cliffs 

 is simply a lingering, modern example of the kind of 

 process, time after time resumed, which remoulded 

 the face of England in its less stable days. Sand- 

 hills are but little more permanent and final ; and 

 where they merge dubiously into shallow waters 

 they produce a like impression as of some new archi- 

 tecture of an upstart Jove, less venerable than the 

 old walls of Saturn. 



Yet every well-marked type of landscape has its 

 own strong features of attraction ; and there is a 

 rare individuality and fullness of human association 

 in the sand-dunes and low shores of the narrow 

 seas on each side of Dover Straits. Travellers 

 returning from the south by train catch their first 

 glimpse of a true northern landscape between Amiens 

 and Boulogne, where the engine flies past the wide, 

 grey estuary of the Canche, with its fleet of fishing 

 boats tossing off the sandy bar. Between the level 

 sea and a wide, inner plain, such as lies behind most 

 North Sea coast-lines, the piled dunes take an aspect 



