Here we are, then, in the "Swallow's Cave." The floor descends by a gentle declivity to the sea, and from the long dark cleft stretching outward you look forth upon the Atlantic—the shore of Ireland the first terra firma in the path of your eye. Here is a dark pool, left by the retreating tide for a refrigerator; and with the champagne in the midst we will recline about it like the soft Asiatics of whom we learned pleasure in the East, and drink to the small-featured and purple-lipped "Mignons" of Syria—those fine-limbed and fiery slaves adorable as peris, and by turns languishing and stormy, whom you buy for a pinch of piastres (say 5L 5s.) in sunny Damascus. Your drowsy Circassian, faint and dreamy, or your crockery Georgian—fit dolls for the sensual Turk—is, to him who would buy soul, dear at a penny the hecatomb.
We recline, as it were, in an ebon pyramid with a hundred feet of floor and sixty of wall, and the fourth side open to the sky. The light comes in mellow and dim, and the sharp edges of the rocky portal seem let into the pearly heaven. The tide is at half-ebb, and the advancing and retreating waves, which at first just lifted the fringe of crimson dulse at the lip of the cavern, now dash their spray-pearls on the rock below, the "tenth" surge alone rallying as if in scorn of its retreating fellow, and, like the chieftain of Culloden Moor, rushing back singly to the contest. And now that the waters reach the entrance no more, come forward and look on the sea! The swell lifts! Would you not think the bases of the earth rising beneath it? It falls! Would you not think the foundation of the deep had given way? A plain, broad enough 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 before us. Mark the color of the sand! White at high-water mark, and thence deepening to a silvery gray as the water has evaporated less, a slab of Egyptian granite in the obelisk of St. Peter's not more polished and unimpressible. Shell or rock, weed or quicksand, there is none; and, mar or deface its bright surface as you will, it is ever beaten down anew, and washed even of the dust of the foot of man by the returning sea. You may write upon its fine-grained face with a crow-quill—you may course over its dazzling expanse with a troop of chariots.
Most wondrous and beautiful of all, within twenty yards of the surf, or for an hour after the tide has left the sand, it holds the water without losing its firmness, and is like a gay mirror, bright as the bosom of the sea. (By your leave, Thalaba!) And now lean over the dasher and see those small fetlocks striking up from beneath—the flying mane, the thoroughbred action, the small and expressive head, as perfect in the reflection as in the reality; like Wordsworth's swan, he
"Trots double, horse and shadow."
You would swear you were skimming the surface of the sea; and the delusion is more complete as the white foam of the "tenth wave" skims in beneath wheel and hoof, and you urge on with the treacherous element gliding away visibly beneath you.