for the moment I forgot everything as I gazed away across those
restless, heaving waters, seemingly without limit, stretching forth
into the dim northward as far as the eye could reach, until water and
sky imperceptibly met and blended. Each advancing wave, racing toward
the beach, was a white-lipped messenger of mystery; and the vast
tumultuous sea, rolling in toward me out of that dark unknown, with its
deep voice of thunder and high-bursting spray, breathed the sublimest
lessons of the Infinite to my soul. It awed, impressed, silenced with
the sense of its solemn power. No dream of ocean grandeur had ever
approached the reality now outspread before me, as this vast inland sea
tossed and quivered to the lashing of the storm-wind that swept its
surface into fury.

To the left and right of where I stood motionless, curved the
shore-line, a seemingly endless succession of white shining sand-hills,
with the sloping shingle up which the huge breakers tossed and rolled
in continuous thunder and foam, rising, breaking, receding, chasing
each other in gigantic play. How savagely strong it all looked! what
uncontrollable majesty lived in every line of the scene! The very
suggestion of tremendous power in it was, to my imagination,
immeasurably increased by its unutterable loneliness, its seemingly
total absence of life; for not a fin rose above the surface, not a wing
brushed the air overhead. The sun, sinking slowly behind the rim of
sand, shot one golden-red ray far out into that tumbling waste, forming
a slender bridge of ever-changing light that seemed to rest suspended
upon the breaking crests of the waves it spanned. Then, gradually,
stealthily, silently, the denser curtain of the twilight drew closer
and closer, and my vista narrowed, as the shadows swept toward me like
black-robed ghosts.