for the navies of the world to ride at large, heaves up evenly and steadily as if it would lie against the sky, rests a moment spell-bound in its place, and falls again as far—­the respiration of a sleeping child not more regular and full of slumber.  It is only on the shore that it chafes.  Blessed emblem! it is at peace with itself!  The rocks war with a nature so unlike their own, and the hoarse din of their border onsets resounds through the caverns they have rent open; but beyond, in the calm bosom of the ocean, what heavenly dignity! what godlike unconsciousness of alarm!  I did not think we should stumble on such a moral in the cave!

By the deeper bass of its hoarse organ the sea is now playing upon its lowest stops, and the tide is down.  Hear how it rushes in beneath the rocks, broken and stilled in its tortuous way, till it ends with a washing and dull hiss among the sea-weed, and, like a myriad of small tinkling bells, the dripping from the crags is audible.  There is fine music in the sea!

And now the beach is bare.  The cave begins to cool and darken, and the first gold tint of sunset is stealing into the sky, and the sea looks of a changing opal, green, purple, and white, as if its floor were paved with pearl, and the changing light struck up through the waters.  And there heaves a ship into the horizon like a white-winged bird, lying with dark breast on the waves, abandoned of the sea-breeze within sight of port, and repelled even by the spicy breath that comes with a welcome off the shore.  She comes from “Merry England.”  She is freighted with more than merchandise.  The home-sick exile will gaze on her snowy sail as she sets in with the morning breeze, and bless it, for the wind that first filled it on its way swept through the green valley of his home!  What links of human affection brings she over the sea?  How much comes in her that is not in her “bill of lading,” yet worth to the heart that is waiting for it a thousand times the purchase of her whole venture!

Mais montons nous!  I hear the small hoofs of Thalaba; my stanhope waits; we will leave this half bottle of champagne, that “remainder biscuit,” and the echoes of our philosophy to the Naiads who have lent us their drawing-room.  Undine, or Egeria!  Lurly, or Arethusa! whatever thou art called, nymph of this shadowy cave! adieu!

Slowly, Thalaba!  Tread gingerly down this rocky descent!  So!  Here we are on the floor of the vasty deep!  What a glorious race-course!  The polished and printless sand spreads away before you as far as the eye can see, the surf comes in below breast-high ere it breaks and the white fringe of the sliding wave shoots up the beach, but leaves room for the marching of a Persian phalanx on the sands it has deserted.  O, how noiselessly runs the wheel, and how dreamily we glide along, feeling our motion but in the resistance of the wind and in the trout-like pull of the ribands by the excited animal