27. Of all inorganic substances, acting in their own proper nature, and without assistance and combination, water is the most wonderful. If we think of it as the source of all the changefulness and beauty which we have seen in clouds,--then, as the instrument by which the earth we have contemplated was modelled into symmetry, and its crags chiselled into grace;--then, as in the form of snow, it robes the mountains it has made with that transcendent light which we could not have conceived if we had not seen;--then, as it exists in the foam of the torrent, in the iris which spans it, in the morning mist which rises from it, in the deep crystalline pools which mirror its hanging shore, in the broad lake and glancing river;--finally, in that which is to all human minds the best emblem of unwearied, unconquerable power the wild, various, fantastic, tameless unity of the sea;--what shall we compare to this mighty, this universal element, for glory and beauty? or how shall we follow its eternal changefulness of feeling? It is like trying to paint a soul! 28. The great angel of the sea--rain; the angel, observe,--the messenger sent to a special place on a special errand. Not the diffused, perpetual presence of the burden of mist, but the going and returning of the intermittent cloud. All turns upon that intermittence. Soft moss on stone and rock; cave fern of tangled glen; wayside well--perennial, patient, silent, clear, stealing through its square font of rough-hewn stone; ever thus deep, no more;--which the winter wreck sullies not, the summer thirst wastes not, incapable of stain as of decline;--where the fallen leaf floats undecayed, and the insect darts undefiling: cressed brook and ever-eddying river, lifted even in flood scarcely over its stepping stones,--but through all sweet summer keeping tremulous music with harp-strings of dark water among the silver fingering of the pebbles. Far away in the south the strong river gods have all hasted, and gone down to the sea. Wasted and burning, white furnaces of blasting sand, their broad beds lie ghastly and bare; but here in the moss lands, the soft wings of the sea angel droop still with dew, and the shadows of their plumes falter on the hills; strange laughings and glitterings of silver streamlets, born suddenly, and twined about the mossy heights in trickling tinsel, answering to them as they wave.