In 1831 I felt only the sadness of that coast, not its more than compensating inspiration; I was yet to learn the real character of that sea. It is in the most solitary little creeks, pierced in between the wildest and most rugged looking rocks, that you will find her truly gay, joyous, buoyant, abounding in glad and vigorous life. Those rocks seem to you to be covered by you know not what greyish ashy asperities--look a little more closely and you perceive that that layer of seeming dust is a little world of living creatures, left there high and dry by the ebb of the sea, to be revived and fed again next tide. There, too, you see our little stone workers, hosts upon hosts of those sea hedge-hogs or urchins, which M. Cailland has so intelligently watched and so admirably described. All this swarming though minute world chooses and feels just contrariwise to our choice and our feeling. Beautiful Normandy terrifies them; the hard pebbles of the beach would crush them, and they love not, either, the crumbling limestone that overhangs the more smiling shore, for they care not to build where at any moment building and foundation may sink into the depths forever. They love and affect only the solid rocks of Brittany. Let us take a lesson from them, and trust only to truth and not to mere appearance. The marine life shuns precisely those enchanting shores whose vegetable life is the most abounding and the most brilliant. They are rich, but rich only in fossils; very curious are they to the geologist, but they yield to him only the bones of the dead. The stern granite, on the contrary, looks down upon the sea swarming with its piscine life, and supports upon its massive breast the humble, but none the less interesting little molluscæ whose laborious life makes the serious charm, the great moral of the sea. And yet amidst all that teeming life there is a deep silence; that infinite population is ever and inevitably silent. Its life is self-concentrated, its labors unmarked, uncheered, by a sound; it has no connection with you or me--to us, that life is only another aspect of Death. A great and a dead solitude, says some feminine heart; it alarms, it saddens me. Wrong! All here is lovable and friendly. These little creatures speak not to the world, but they all the time are hard at work for it. They yield themselves up to the sublime voice of their sublime parent, the Ocean, that speaks for them; by his great utterance, they speak, confidingly, and by proxy. Between the silent earth and the mute tribes of the sea, a great, strong, grave, and sympathetic dialogue is constantly carried on--the harmonious agreement with the _Great I AM_, with himself and his great work--that great eternal conflict which, everywhere and always, is Love. CHAPTER V. THE FIERY AND THE WATERY CIRCLE--THE CURRENTS OF THE SEA.