Such is the king to whom Viking chieftains bowed their heads, and whom the modern and palatial steamship defies with impunity seven times a week.  And yet it is but defiance, not victory.  The magnificent barbarian sits enthroned in a mantle of gold-lined clouds looking from on high on great ships gliding like mechanical toys upon his sea and on men who, armed with fire and iron, no longer need to watch anxiously for the slightest sign of his royal mood.  He is disregarded; but he has kept all his strength, all his splendour, and a great part of his power.  Time itself, that shakes all the thrones, is on the side of that king.  The sword in his hand remains as sharp as ever upon both its edges; and he may well go on playing his royal game of quoits with hurricanes, tossing them over from the continent of republics to the continent of kingdoms, in the assurance that both the new republics and the old kingdoms, the heat of fire and the strength of iron, with the untold generations of audacious men, shall crumble to dust at the steps of his throne, and pass away, and be forgotten before his own rule comes to an end.

XXX.

The estuaries of rivers appeal strongly to an adventurous imagination.  This appeal is not always a charm, for there are estuaries of a particularly dispiriting ugliness:  lowlands, mud-flats, or perhaps barren sandhills without beauty of form or amenity of aspect, covered with a shabby and scanty vegetation conveying the impression of poverty and uselessness.  Sometimes such an ugliness is merely a repulsive mask.  A river whose estuary resembles a breach in a sand rampart may flow through a most fertile country.  But all the estuaries of great rivers have their fascination, the attractiveness of an open portal.  Water is friendly to man.  The ocean, a part of Nature furthest removed in the unchangeableness and majesty of its might from the spirit of mankind, has ever been a friend to the enterprising nations of the earth.  And of all the elements this is the one to which men have always been prone to trust themselves, as if its immensity held a reward as vast as itself.

From the offing the open estuary promises every possible fruition to adventurous hopes.  That road open to enterprise and courage invites the explorer of coasts to new efforts towards the fulfilment of great expectations.  The commander of the first Roman galley must have looked with an intense absorption upon the estuary of the Thames as he turned the beaked prow of his ship to the westward under the brow of the North Foreland.  The estuary of the Thames is not beautiful; it has no noble features, no romantic grandeur of aspect, no smiling geniality; but it is wide open, spacious, inviting, hospitable at the first glance, with a strange air of mysteriousness which lingers about it to this very day.  The navigation of his craft must have engrossed all the Roman’s