The receding day carries with it the disquieting influences, and night exorcises the demons of unrest. They scurry away with the sunset clouds on the horizon like fleeing witches. As if in obedience to some silent command, the sea becomes passive. He must be distraught indeed who can look at it now without coming under the spell of the hour--the serene hour. It is as if the passion and strife of life had been succeeded by the beautiful calm of death. To gaze on the mute and motionless ocean at ebb-tide is to be inevitably inspired to reflection, so potent is the suggestion of repose. Apparently the forces of Nature have conspired together for peace. Death? Nay, rather transfiguration, for now the sea is illumined by a golden radiance. Stretches of burnished copper and molten gold merge one into the other; areas again of liquid silver, and beyond, the vast ethereal blue. Out of the coves shadows come creeping and stealing over the water, silently advancing to overwhelm the rose and copper and gold, while these recede and slip out to sea, growing fainter and fainter until they are absorbed in the all-pervading dusk. In the succeeding darkness one beholds, not the sea, but a vast bottomless pit, Dantesque and terrible. Above all else it is the immense vigor of the sea which appeals to us. We are made to feel the play of cosmic forces. The long stretch of rocky coast is rude and Titanic; the expanse of ocean suggests that chaos from which the earth has gradually been redeemed. The waters piling themselves up are as elemental and chaotic as nebulæ or the seething envelopes of the sun. It is incredible they should be hitched to the gentle moon, and should follow that pale phantom like a leashed panther, now purring, now growling, but obedient always. The mountains impress one with their age, the sea with its agelessness. Here at least is something which appears superior to Time. It is no more youth than it is age--the formless, without beginning and without end, but always that superabundant vigor, power, freedom. Denuded woodland and disfigured landscape bring to mind that iron Necessity which it is not pleasant to see advertised. But the sea is unimproved. It is the universal solvent, and dissolves the trivial, the commonplace, the mean, and gives an heroic cast to whatever it touches. One needs, however, to observe it from the shore and to have that vantage which is derived from being on land. In mid-ocean it is too entirely dominant--there is nothing to afford contrast. It is like the moon--so fair at a distance, such desolation upon its surface. One can be alone on the mountains and find them friendly, but who would choose to be alone in mid-ocean? There is a sense of isolation, a disassociation, as if one had, in fact, severed connection with earthly affairs altogether; hour after hour and day after day the same inscrutable desert of water, which begins everywhere and ends nowhere.