upon the level beach.  And here amid our idle pastime we sat down upon almost the only stone that breaks the surface of the sand, and were lost in an unlooked-for and overpowering conception of the majesty and awfulness of the great deep.  Thus by tracking our footprints in the sand we track our own nature in its wayward course, and steal a glance upon it when it never dreams of being so observed.  Such glances always make us wiser.

This extensive beach affords room for another pleasant pastime.  With your staff you may write verses—­love-verses if they please you best—­and consecrate them with a woman’s name.  Here, too, may be inscribed thoughts, feelings, desires, warm outgushings from the heart’s secret places, which you would not pour upon the sand without the certainty that almost ere the sky has looked upon them the sea will wash them out.  Stir not hence till the record be effaced.  Now (for there is room enough on your canvas) draw huge faces—­huge as that of the Sphynx on Egyptian sands—­and fit them with bodies of corresponding immensity and legs which might stride halfway 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 halfway upward with seaweed; 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 and forth, filling it with tumultuous foam and then leaving its floor of black pebbles bare and glistening.  In this chasm there was once an intersecting vein of