to be low water about two o'clock, and we resolved to dine upon the sands.
But all the morning the children were out playing on the threshold of old
Neptune's palace; for in his quieter mood he will, like a fierce
mastiff, let children do with him what they will. I gave myself a whole
holiday--sometimes the most precious part of my life both for myself and
those for whom I labour--and wandered about on the shore, now passing the
children, and assailed with a volley of cries and entreaties to look at
this one's castle and that one's ditch, now leaving them behind, with what
in its ungraduated flatness might well enough personate an endless
desert of sand between, over the expanse of which I could imagine them
disappearing on a far horizon, whence however a faint occasional cry of
excitement and pleasure would reach my ears. The sea was so calm, and the
shore so gently sloping, that you could hardly tell where the sand ceased
and the sea began--the water sloped to such a thin pellicle, thinner
than any knife-edge, upon the shining brown sand, and you saw the sand
underneath the water to such a distance out. Yet this depth, which would
not drown a red spider, was the ocean. In my mind I followed that bed of
shining sand, bared of its hiding waters, out and out, till I was lost in
an awful wilderness of chasms, precipices, and mountain-peaks, in whose
caverns the sea-serpent may dwell, with his breath of pestilence; the
kraken, with "his skaly rind," may there be sleeping

"His ancient dreamless, uninvaded sleep,"

while

"faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides,"

as he lies