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I rose early next morning, and felt the spirit-stirring power of the sea breeze.  In those days, Brighton covered but the borders of the shore.  It was scarcely more than a little line of fishermen’s cottages, fenced against the surge by the remaining timbers of boats which had long seen their last adventure.  Scattered at distances of at least a quarter of a mile from each other, lay some houses of a better description, a few deeply embosomed in trees, or rather in such thickets as could grow in the perpetual exposure to the rough winds and saline exhalations of the Channel.  Of those, the one in which I had taken up my present residence was amongst the best; though its exterior was so unpresuming, that I was inclined to give Mordecai, or rather his gay heiress, credit for humility, or perhaps for the refinement of striking their visiters with the contrast between its simplicity of exterior and richness of decoration within.

It was a brisk, bright morning, and the waves were curling before a lively breeze, the sun was glowing above, and clusters of vessels, floating down the Channel, spread their sails like masses of summer cloud in the sunshine.  It was my first sight of the ocean, and that first sight is always a new idea.  Alexander the Great, standing on the shores of the Persian Gulf, said, “That he then first felt what the world was.”  Often as I have seen the ocean since, the same conception has always forced itself on me.

In what a magnificent world do we live!  What power, what depth, what expanse, lay before me!  How singular, too, that while the grandeur of the land arises from bold irregularity and incessant change of aspect, from the endless variety of forest, vale, and mountain; the same effect should be produced on the ocean by an absence of all irregularity and all change!  A simple, level horizon, perfectly unbroken, a line of almost complete uniformity, compose a grandeur that impresses and fills the soul as powerfully as the most cloud-piercing Alp, or the Andes clothed with thunder.

This was the ocean in calm; but how glorious, too, in tempest!  The storm that sweeps the land is simply a destroyer or a renovator; it smites the surface, and is gone.  But the ocean is the seat of its power, the scene of its majesty, the element in which it sports, lives, and rules—­penetrating to its depths, rolling its surface in thunder on the shore—­changing its whole motion, its aspect, its uses, and, grand as it is in its serenity, giving it another and a more awful grandeur in its convulsion.  Then, how strangely, yet how admirably, does it fulfil its great human object!  Its depth and extent seem to render it the very element of separation; all the armies of the earth might be swallowed up between the shores of the Channel.  Yet it is this element which actually combines the remotest regions of the earth.  Divisions and barriers are essential to the protection of kingdoms from each other; yet what height of mountain range, or what depth of precipice could be so secure as the defence so simply and perpetually supplied by a surrounding sea?  While this protecting element at the same time pours the wealth of the globe into the bosom of a nation.