sands to seaward of the breakwater, which lay above, looking dry and
weary, and worn with years of contest with the waves, which had at length
withdrawn defeated to their own country, and left it as if to victory and a
useless age of peace. How different was the scene when a raving mountain of
water filled all the hollow where I now wandered, and rushed over the top
of that mole now so high above me; and I had to cling to its stones to keep
me from being carried off like a bit of floating sea-weed! This was the
loveliest and strangest part of the shore. Several long low ridges of rock,
of whose existence I scarcely knew, worn to a level with the sand, hollowed
and channelled with the terrible run of the tide across them, and looking
like the old and outworn cheek-teeth of some awful beast of prey, stretched
out seawards. Here and there amongst them rose a well-known rock, but now
so changed in look by being lifted all the height between the base on the
waters, and the second base in the sand, that I wondered at each, walking
round and viewing it on all sides. It seemed almost a fresh growth out of
the garden of the shore, with uncouth hollows around its fungous root,
and a forsaken air about its brows as it stood in the dry sand and looked
seaward. But what made the chief delight of the spot, closed in by rocks
from the open sands, was the multitude of fairy rivers that flowed across
it to the sea. The gladness these streams gave me I cannot communicate. The
tide had filled thousands of hollows in the breakwater, hundreds of cracked
basins in the rocks, huge sponges of sand; from all of which--from cranny
and crack, and oozing sponge--the water flowed in restricted haste back,
back to the sea, tumbling in tiny cataracts down the faces of the rocks,
bubbling from their roots as from wells, gathering in tanks of sand, and
overflowing in broad shallow streams, curving and sweeping in their sandy
channels, just like, the great rivers of a continent;--here spreading into
smooth silent lakes and reaches, here babbling along in ripples and waves
innumerable--flowing, flowing, to lose their small beings in the same ocean
that met on the other side the waters of the Mississippi, the Orinoco, the