The headlands, the sandy beaches, the bold capes and the low shores, command various, but ever useful, views of the great sea, stern and wild at the first glance, but divine and friendly, as we come to know it better. The advantage of the headlands is that at the foot of one of those giant rock-walls we more entirely than elsewhere appreciate the breathing and bounding pulse of the sea. Insensible, imperceptible, on the Mediterranean, that pulse is very distinct on the ocean. The Ocean breathes and pulsates, even as you and I do; it compels me to calculate my days and hours, and to look up to Heaven. It reminds me alike of myself and of the world. Let me seat myself upon some such shore, that, for instance, of Antifer, whence I may look out upon that vast expanse. The sea which, but a moment agone, seemed dead, has suddenly shuddered and become tremulous--first symptom of the great approaching movement. The tide has heaved past Cherbourg and Barfleur, and turned sharply and violently round the lighthouse; its divided waters lave Calvados, rush upon Havre and come to me at Étretat, at Fécamp, at Dieppe, to hurl themselves into the canal despite the strong Northern currents. It is for me to watch its hour. Its height, almost indifferent to the sandhills, is here, at the foot of the headland, alike worthy of your attention and powerful to command it. This long rock-wall of thirty leagues has but few stairways. Its narrow inlets, which form our smaller havens, occur at rare and great distances. And at low water we can with inquiring gaze inspect and question the strata above strata, gigantically and regularly superposed, which, as so many Titanic registers, tell us the history of accumulated ages of growth and decay, of life and death. From that great open book of time every year tears away a page. We have before us a piece of an hourly perishing, hourly renewing, world, which the sea from beneath is hourly devouring, and the torrents and the tempests, the frosts and the thaws from above, are hourly, and still more destructively, attacking. Wearing, crushing, beating, pulverising, wave, and wind, and storm and Time, that great _Edax rerum_, that unsparing and untiring Moth of the Universe, are, even as we gaze, converting the one vast rocky mass into the rounded and petty pebble. It is this rough work which makes this coast, so richly fertile on the land side, a real maritime desert on the seaward. A few, very few, sea plants survive the eternal crushing and grinding of the ever crushed and ever crushing pebbles driven hither and thither by every wave that every wind scourges into motion. The molluscæ, and even the very fish shun this vexed shore. Great contrast that between an inland country so genial, and such a stern, rugged, threatening and inhospitable coast.