Where the land enchants, the sea intoxicates--its sparkle, its mobility, its translucence excite the fancy, as wine does the blood--it combines those elements which produce at once awe and ecstasy in the soul--the unknown, the resistless, the beautiful. One may be melancholy by the sea, but never morbid or supine. Between it and the land there are no gradations; you do not come imperceptibly under its influence, as, in ascending a mountain, you come into the cooler atmosphere; as you approach, you are suddenly enveloped and animated by a crystalline, vivifying element: this is the sea air; those saline qualities, so harsh to the taste, prove a delicious stimulant in the lungs. The sea is incommunicable--neither words, or canvas prepare you for it, as they may often for landscapes; like Livingston's untutored savage, you are always startled and overwhelmed at first sight of it; you feel, like him, an impulse to leap into its waves. If you want to surrender yourself wholly to the sea influence--to study it and assimilate your mind to all its phases--you should choose, as was my fortune, a little fishing town, on the shore, with a sheltered bay to the south and west and the ocean eastward. Here you will find life stripped of care and conventionality; idealized, seductive, and illusive, the days swinging from charm to charm, like bubbles in the sunlight. On such a coast, Nature never confuses her effects--no lively verdure or picturesque landscape intrudes upon the majesty of the sea--only damp mosses and stout creepers veil the harsh outlines of the rocks, and, in the distance, masses of pine trees relieve the gray monotony of the shore--for the rest, everything is left to the sun and the sea. There are a dozen beaches, each distinct in its charm. Some firm, smooth, and white, as a marble walk--others mere waves of sand, which the lightest breeze whirls--and, others, where nature seems to have exhausted her wildest caprice, piled with rocks, black, perilous, defiant, overlooking waters whose solitude is never broken by a sail. It is these deep waters which have that green tint so lustrous and subtle, and as unlike the heavy green seen in most sea pictures as it is unlike grass; it is in more sheltered nooks that the sea assumes that sapphire sheen more ineffable than the sky which imparts it. As the color of the sea depends greatly upon the disposition of the surrounding lands and the prevailing condition of the atmosphere, each little inlet has some tint or effect of light peculiar to itself. I have seen coloring as remarkable--I had almost said as unnatural--as that indigo blue which we connect with the AEgean sea. Indeed, one comes to believe anything possible in the way of sea coloring, however brilliant, or however blank, after intimate and close observation of even a small part of the ocean. I have often fancied that these local features may have given rise to the idea of