How beautiful the sea-coast is! At the foot of a cliff, perhaps of pure white chalk, or rich red sandstone, or stern grey granite, lies the shore of gravel or sand, with a few scattered plants of blue Sea Holly, or yellow-flowered Horned Poppies, Sea-kale, Sea Convolvulus, Saltwort, Artemisia, and Sea-grasses; the waves roll leisurely in one by one, and as they reach the beach, each in turn rises up in an arch of clear, cool, transparent, green water, tipped with white or faintly pinkish foam, and breaks lovingly on the sands; while beyond lies the open Sea sparkling in the sunshine.
... O pleasant Sea
Earth hath not a plain
So boundless or so beautiful as thine.[57]
The Sea is indeed at times overpoweringly beautiful. At morning and evening a sheet of living silver or gold, at mid-day deep blue; even
Too deeply blue; too beautiful; too bright;
Oh, that the shadow of a cloud might rest
Somewhere upon the splendour of thy breast
In momentary gloom.[58]
There are few prettier sights than the beach at a seaside town on a fine summer's day; the waves sparkling in the sunshine, the water and sky each bluer than the other, while the sea seems as if it had nothing to do but to laugh and play with the children on the sands; the children perseveringly making castles with spades and pails, which the waves then run up to and wash away, over and over and over again, until evening comes and the children go home, when the Sea makes everything smooth and ready for the next day's play.
Many are satisfied to admire the Sea from shore, others more ambitious or more free prefer a cruise. They feel with Tennyson's voyager:
We left behind the painted buoy
That tosses at the harbour-mouth;
And madly danced our hearts with joy,
As fast we fleeted to the South:
How fresh was every sight and sound
On open main or winding shore!
We knew the merry world was round,
And we might sail for evermore.
Many appreciate both. The long roll of the Mediterranean on a fine day (and I suppose even more of the Atlantic, which I have never enjoyed), far from land in a good ship, and with kind friends, is a joy never to be forgotten.
To the Gulf Stream and the Atlantic Ocean Northern Europe owes its mild climate. The same latitudes on the other side of the Atlantic are much colder. To find the same average temperature in the United States we must go far to the south. Immediately opposite us lies Labrador, with an average temperature the same as that of Greenland; a coast almost destitute of vegetation, a country of snow and ice, whose principal wealth consists in its furs, and a scattered population, mainly composed of Indians and Esquimaux. But the Atlantic would not alone produce so great an effect. We owe our mild and genial climate mainly to the Gulf Stream—a river in the ocean, twenty million times as great as the Rhone—the greatest, and for us the most important, river in the world, which brings to our shores the sunshine of the West Indies.
The Sea is outside time. A thousand, ten thousand, or a million years ago it must have looked just as it does now, and as it will ages hence. With the land this is not so. The mountains and hills, rivers and valleys, animals and plants are continually changing: but the Sea is always the same,