Nevertheless, were I asked what coast the most grandly and powerfully impresses me, I should answer, that of Brittany, especially those wild and sublime headlands of granite which terminate the old world at that bold point which dominates the Atlantic and defies the western storm winds. Nowhere have I better felt than there, those lofty and ennobling melancholies which are the best impressions of the sea. But I must explain, here. There are different melancholies; there is a melancholy of the weak, and a melancholy of the strong,--the melancholy of the too sensitive souls who weep only for themselves, and that of the disinterested hearts, which cheerfully accept their own lot, and find nature ever blessing and blessed, but feel the evils of society, and in melancholy itself find strength for action, means for creating good or mitigating evil. Ah! what need we have, we of the working brain, often to strengthen our souls in that mood which we may call _heroic melancholy_. When, some thirty years since, I paid a visit to this country, I could not account for the potent attraction that it had for me. At the foundation of this attractive potency of Brittany, is its great harmony. Elsewhere, we feel, though we cannot explain it to ourselves, a certain discordance between the race and the soil. The very beautiful Norman race, in those districts in which it is most unmixed, and where it retains the peculiar, ruddy complexion of the true Scandinavian, has not the slightest apparent affinity with the territory upon which it has intruded itself. In Brittany, on the contrary, on the most ancient geological formation on our globe, on that soil of granite and of flint, lives a race solid as that granite, sharp as that flint, a sturdy and antique race. Just as much as Normandy progresses, Brittany retrogrades. Witty, lively, and too imaginative, the impossible, the utterly absurd, are ever welcome to her. But, if wrong on many points, she is great upon a most important one; she has character; often you may think her erroneous, but never can you deem her common-place. If we would for a time emerge from that wretched common-place, that deadly liveliness, that horrible waking dream "of stupid starers and of loud huzzas," let us seat ourselves on one of the impending and commanding peaks that overlook the bay of Douarnenez,--the stern, bold headland, for instance, of Penmark. Or, if the wind blow too strongly there for our frame, effeminated by the late hours, the bad atmosphere, and the hateful habits, and still more hateful passions, of the thronged city, let us take a quiet sail among the lower isles of the Morbihan, where the soft warm tide is lazy, and all but soundless. Where Brittany is mild, Brittany is surpassingly mild. Sailing among her islands and on her gentler tides, you might fancy yourself on Lethe; but, on the other hand, when Brittany is aroused, Brittany, take my word for it, is terribly strong and terribly in earnest!