XXX.



The estuaries of rivers appeal strongly to an adventurous
imagination. This appeal is not always a charm, for there are
estuaries of a particularly dispiriting ugliness: lowlands, mud-
flats, or perhaps barren sandhills without beauty of form or
amenity of aspect, covered with a shabby and scanty vegetation
conveying the impression of poverty and uselessness. Sometimes
such an ugliness is merely a repulsive mask. A river whose estuary
resembles a breach in a sand rampart may flow through a most
fertile country. But all the estuaries of great rivers have their
fascination, the attractiveness of an open portal. Water is
friendly to man. The ocean, a part of Nature furthest removed in
the unchangeableness and majesty of its might from the spirit of
mankind, has ever been a friend to the enterprising nations of the
earth. And of all the elements this is the one to which men have
always been prone to trust themselves, as if its immensity held a
reward as vast as itself.

From the offing the open estuary promises every possible fruition
to adventurous hopes. That road open to enterprise and courage
invites the explorer of coasts to new efforts towards the
fulfilment of great expectations. The commander of the first Roman
galley must have looked with an intense absorption upon the estuary
of the Thames as he turned the beaked prow of his ship to the
westward under the brow of the North Foreland. The estuary of the
Thames is not beautiful; it has no noble features, no romantic