But the above will sound to some persons too “Epicurean.” O gentle reader, do you love moonlight? and if you have ever admired the reflection of that planet in a lake or river, what will you say to it when you contemplate it in Sandown Bay? Culver on one side, looking as if it were of green glass, and the cliffs of Shanklin on the other resembling walls and pillars of porphyry! Or is your taste for the sterner beauty of storms and angry seas? Then visit Blackgang Chine late in winter, and you may “sup full of horrors.” The appearance of the waves below, as they come in over that fatal “race,” and the aspect of the earth and the heavens above, when the lightning darts from “St. Catherine’s head” and sweeps like a destroying Angel down the chasm of the Chine, yield together perhaps the grandest picture of desolation and terror that English scenery ever shows. There are persons still living who are unwilling _to speak_ of the fearful tempest they witnessed on that coast when the Clarendon was lost. Lastly, to return to our “pebbles,” the sea is an indefatigable agent in the partly mechanical, partly chemical, work of infiltration; a process to which both the fine texture and varied colours of these agatized fossils are mainly due. But of this I must treat in the chapter which follows. Enough, for the present, of the ocean itself—of its labours and its sports. But, as some readers love _a comparison_, and hold that every theme grows dull without this, I will quote from the lips of a great traveller, whom it was once my luck to meet, his opinion of the rival claims of the Desert, to that admiration which we islanders lavish on the heaving Ocean and the winding Shore. I cannot pretend to remember his very words; but he was eloquent as the son of Laertes, and he made me long to visit the East. He said that the Desert was “another world,” more marvellous than this of our land and sea: it was a home and a domain, like the former; yet was it waste and boundless as the latter. I asked about the _sands_. “Vast, beyond computation.” “And the material?” “Powdered quartz, all of it. Quartz mountains, crushed, and pulverized, and sifted!” The reddish hue is from the peroxide of iron. No particle of anything like organized matter has ever been detected in its composition. The caravan-camels which drop and die daily on their hot march, as they have done for centuries, leave their skeletons, after the vulture’s inquest is over, to bleach upon the surface; and, in the course of a season or two, these bones must turn to an impalpable powder: but that does not mix with the sand, or phosphate of lime would at once be found on analyzing it.