Clara saw that there was truth and justice in these observations, and though she felt a considerable degree of reluctance, she could not refuse her mother's request; and the letters in all their fulness and interest and with all their fine compliments, were committed to what newspaper editors call the devouring element. CHAPTER IX. "Full many a lady I have eyed with best regard." SHAKSPEARE. The sea-side is an excellent place for those who have nothing to do, and none but those can duly and rightly appreciate its advantages. To saunter about on the beach and listen to the roaring of the waters, and watch the tide rising or falling--to hear the rushing rattling of the pebbles that are rolled on the beach with every successive wave--to see the distant sail, now dark beneath a passing cloud, and then bright again as a leaf of silver from the light of the sun--to watch the sea-birds in their reeling, wheeling, staggering flight--to mark the little dabs of sea-weed in their grotesque variety, and to measure the progress of the tide by their disappearance on encroaching waves, or to measure how much the waters have receded, by observing how this, that, and the other weed are drier and farther from the reach of the wave--to notice the pretty wonder, and see the waving ringlets and fluttering bonnets of the little ones who are brought to breathe health and animation on the coast--to watch the sentimental looks of the solitary wanderer who comes there to breathe poetry--to see the flushed indications of a swelling heart in the looks of those who seem to hear in the sound of the rushing waters a voice from beloved and distant ones; these, and ten thousand other pretty occupations, banish from the mind all feeling of indolence, and make it fancy itself employed. And surely it is quite as well employed in seeing and feeling poetry as in reading it. To speak after the figurative and flowery style of Rebecca Henderson's pa, we might say that nature is all poetry, groves are her sonnets, gardens her madrigals, mountains her pindarics, and seas her epics. In walking by the sea-side, there is no thought of loss of time; for the sea being an emblem of eternity, banishes all thought of time from the mind. Thus wandered there, day after day, our young friend, Clara Rivolta.