That very element which we term fluid, shifting, capricious, suffers, in reality, no change; on the contrary it is a very perfect model of regularity. The really and constantly changing creature is Man. His body of this year will have evaporated by this time next year, for, according to Berzolius, four-fifths of our frame are water, which at every instant we yield to the ever craving atmosphere. Fragile and fleeting creature as Man is, he has indeed good reason for reflection and for humility when he finds himself in presence of the great unchanging, and, humanly speaking, unchangeable, powers of nature, just, and grand, glorious, as is his hope, his belief, his certainty of a spiritual immortality. Despite that delightful hope, that confident belief, that sustaining certainty, Man yet is necessarily and terribly saddened by the smiting and strange suddenness with which he hourly sees the thread of man's life forever broken. The Sea seems to exult over our fleeting tenure of a life of which we cannot anticipate, far less command, one added moment. Whenever we approach her, she seems to murmur from her dark, inscrutable depths, unchangeable as His will who made them—"Mortal! to-morrow you shall pass away, but I, I am, and ever shall be, unchanged, unchangeable, mighty and mysterious. The earth will not only receive your bones but will soon convert them into kindred and indistinguishable earth, but I, ever and always, shall remain, main, the same majestic and indifferent entity, the great perfectly balanced Life, daily harmonising myself with the harmonious and majestic life of the bright far worlds that shine above and around you." A stern and a scorning rebuke that is which is given to our poor human pride when, twice in our every mortal day the sea tears from our vexed shores the stony spoils which twice in every day she scornfully and terribly hurls back again. To any imagination but that of the trained and veteran seaman, the fierce rush of the rising tide infallibly suggests the likeness of a fierce and deadly combat; but when the child, or the Savage, observes that the fury of the sea has its inevitable limits, the terror of the child or Savage is turned—true coward-fashion—into an unreasoning compound of hate and rage, and he as fiercely, as impotently, pelts the terrible waves with the very pebbles which without effort, without consciousness, she has cast, heaps upon heaps, by ship loads, at every vast beat of her semi-diurnal pulse! Foaming, roaring, threatening, the waves rush shoreward; the boy observes that though they may kiss, they cannot, at his safe stand-point, submerge his delicate little feet, returns laughter for their roarings, petty pebbles for their impotent threats.
I saw a battle of this sort at Havre, in July, 1831. A little boy whom I took thither felt his young courage aroused and his young pride stung, by the loud challenges and fierce threats of the incoming tide, and he returned scorn for threat, feebly-thrown pebble for surging and mighty wave. Greatly, aye, laughably unequal was the strife between that small, white, delicate and feeble hand of the young mortal, and the vast and terrible force which cared not about it, feared it not, felt it not, knew it not. Laughably, said I? Ah! no inclination towards laughter remains with us when we reflect upon the fleeting existence, the ephemeral and impotent fragility of our best beloved, our fellows, our Maker's favored, erring, vain-glorious, and, in the last issue, utterly helpless Humanity, when in presence of that tireless and inscrutable Eternity to which we may at any moment be recalled! Such was one of my earliest glances at the Ocean; such the gloomy meditations, only too truly and too sternly realized, that were suggested to me by that combat between the fierce Sea upon which I look so often, and the glad and laughing, and buoyant child upon whom, alas! I shall look, lovingly and anxiously, no more.
THE BEACH, THE SANDS, AND THE IRON-BOUND COAST, CONTINUED.
Look upon the Ocean where and when you may, you everywhere and alway shall find her the same grand and terrible teacher of that hardest of all the lessons man has to learn,—man's insignificance. Take your stand upon some bold headland, from which with earnest and well trained eye, you can sweep the entire horizon; or, wander, with shortened ken, in the sandy desert;—go whithersoever you will, where old Ocean shall lash the shore, and everywhere and alway, I repeat, you shall find Ocean the same—mighty and terrible. True it is, that our finite and dim gaze cannot discern the, humanly speaking, Infinity of the Ocean; but we feel, we instinctively comprehend, that Infinity, and the impression made by that instructive comprehension is even deeper than could be made by Ocean visibly to our material eye, tangibly to our poor human hand.
Such, so deep, so permanent, was the impression made upon me by that wild tumultuous scene on the scourged-shore where Granville—dear old Granville!—keeps neutral watch between Normandy and Brittany. The wealthy, kindly and hearty, though bluff, and somewhat vulgar Normandy with its vast outspread of orchard and meadow suddenly disappears, and, by Granville and by the frowning Saint Michel we pass all at once into quite another world. For Granville, though Norman as to race, is thoroughly Breton as to aspect. Sternly, solidly, invincibly, the great Rock rears his defiant front, and looks down in a quite insolent contempt upon the wild surges that incessantly assault, but never harm, that passionless and mutely mocking Titan. Let the wild winds, unpent from their northern caverns, sweep the rugged coast; borne on the cross-currents from the angry West, let the wind sweep all things else clear from its path and this stern unconquerable rock ever and alway saith "thus far shalt thou come, but no farther. Strengthened though you are by your mad trans-Atlantic leap of a thousand leagues, against me your fury shall be spent in vain."
I loved that odd and somewhat dull little town, which owes its support to the distant and most perilous fishery. Every family there, feels that it is supported by a dread game in which human life is at stake; and this feeling produces a certain harmonious gravity in the aspect and tone of the dwellers hereabout, and of all their surroundings. A touching and a hallowing melancholy, that, of which I have often felt the influence, when, walking on the already darkening shore or gazing from the upper town that crowns the great rock, I have seen the sun sink below the far and misty horizon, harshly streaked by alternate rays of luridness and gloom, and not pausing to tint the sky with those glowing and fantastic brilliances which in other climes delight us. Here it is already autumn in August, and twilight scarcely exists. Scarcely has the sun set, when the shrewd winds freshen, and the dark green waves sweep on with added force; below, you see a few spectral forms hurrying along in their dark cloaks, and from afar you hear the melancholy bleatings of the sheep already benighted on their scanty pasturage.
The very small upper town rears its northern front sharply and boldly above the very edge of a cold dark abyss, facing the great sea, and swept by an eternal blast. This part of the place consists of only poor houses, and in one of them I found my quarters with a poor man, a maker of those pretty shell pictures for which the place is famous. Ascending by a ladder, rather than a staircase, into a dark little room, I looked out upon the strange wild scene, as strange and tragic, as wild and impressive, as that which had presented itself, when, also from a window, I had caught my first view of the great glacier of the Swiss Grindelwald. The glacier had shown an enormous monster of peaked icebergs which seemed crashing down upon me; and this vexed sea of Granville seemed an army of monstrous waves all rushing together to the attack.