room enough on your canvas--draw huge faces,--huge as that of the
Sphinx on Egyptian sands,--and fit them with bodies of corresponding
immensity, and legs which might stride half-way to yonder island.
Child's play becomes magnificent on so grand a scale. But, after all,
the most fascinating employment is simply to write your name in the
sand. Draw the letters gigantic, so that two strides may barely
measure them, and three for the long strokes! Cut deep, that the
record may be permanent! Statesmen, and warriors, and poets have
spent their strength in no better cause than this. Is it
accomplished? Return, then, in an hour or two, and seek for this
mighty record of a name. The sea will have swept over it, even as
time rolls its effacing waves over the names of statesmen, and
warriors, and poets. Hark, the surf wave laughs at you!

Passing from the beach, I begin to clamber over the crags, making my
difficult way among the ruins of a rampart, shattered and broken by
the assaults of a fierce enemy. The rocks rise in every variety of
attitude; some of them have their feet in the foam, and are shagged
half-way upward with sea-weed; some have been hollowed almost into
caverns by the unwearied toil of the sea, which can afford to spend
centuries in wearing away a rock, or even polishing a pebble. One
huge rock ascends in monumental shape, with a face like a giant's
tombstone, on which the veins resemble inscriptions, but in an unknown
tongue. We will fancy them the forgotten characters of an
antediluvian race; or else that Nature's own hand has here recorded a
mystery, which, could I read her language, would make mankind the
wiser and the happier. How many a thing has troubled me with that
same idea! Pass on, and leave it unexplained. Here is a narrow
avenue, which might seem to have been hewn through the very heart of
an enormous crag, affording passage for the rising sea to thunder back