and eagerly this coming tide swirls round them! All day the
fishes haunt their shadows; all night the phosphorescent water
glimmers by them, and washes with long, refluent waves along
their sides, decking their blackness with a spray of stars.

Water seems the natural outlet and discharge for every landscape,
and when we have followed down this artificial promontory, a
wharf, and have seen the waves on three sides of us, we have
taken the first step toward circumnavigating the globe. This is
our last terra firma. One step farther, and there is no possible
foothold but a deck, which tilts and totters beneath our feet. A
wharf, therefore, is properly neutral ground for all. It is a
silent hospitality, understood by all nations. It is in some sort
a thing of universal ownership. Having once built it, you must
grant its use to everyone; it is no trespass to land upon any
man's wharf.

The sea, like other beautiful savage creatures, derives most of
its charm from its reserves of untamed power. When a wild animal
is subdued to abjectness, all its interest is gone. The ocean is
never thus humiliated. So slight an advance of its waves would
overwhelm us, if only the restraining power once should fail, and
the water keep on rising! Even here, in these safe haunts of
commerce, we deal with the same salt tide which I myself have
seen ascend above these piers, and which within half a century
drowned a whole family in their home upon our Long Wharf.

It is still the same ungoverned ocean which, twice in every
twenty-four hours, reasserts its right of way, and stops only
where it will. At Monckton, on the Bay of Fundy, the wharves are