The Sea, so ill treated by man, in this pitiless warfare, has been to him most generously kind. When Earth, which he loves so much, when that rude Earth wears, weakens, exhausts him, it is that so much feared, so much abused Sea, which takes him to her bosom, and restores him to new life. And, in fact, is it not from her that life primitively sprang? She contains within her all the elements of life in a quite marvellous plenitude. Why, then, when we feel ourselves sinking, do we not repair for restoration to the abounding source of life? That source has space and kindness enough for all, but is especially kind to the too civilized children of men, for the sons and daughters who are suffering for the fathers and mothers, victims of mistaken or sinning Love, less culpable than the sinning parents, yet a thousand fold more punished. The Sea, that vast female, delights to restore them; to their weakness she gives her strength; and restores them young, beautiful, healthful, from the boundless stores of her wide expanse and fathomless depths. Venus, who was born of Ocean, is from Ocean reborn every moment, and not a sick, suffering, peevish, pale, and melancholy Venus, but the triumphant, Venus full of passion and certain of fecundity. How between this great and salutary, but somewhat rude, strength and our weakness, can there be any connection? What union can there be between elements so greatly disproportioned? That was a serious and difficult question; to solve it required an art, an initiation. To understand that question thoroughly, we must make ourselves acquainted with the time and occasion when this art first revealed itself. Between two ages of strength, the strength of the age of the Renaissance and that of the Revolution, there was a period of depression both moral and physical. The old world had died, the new one was not yet born, and the misbegotten children of worn out parents were weak and unhealthy. On the one hand, the excessive indulgence of the rich; on the other hand, the awful privations of the poor, decimated the nations, and most decimated, precisely those nations which most boasted their civilization. France thrice ruined, from base to apex, in a single century succumbed beneath the orgies of the Regency. England triumphed over our ruin, yet had death and destruction within her own bosom. Her Puritan idea had departed, and another had not yet come. Weakened by the fierce lusts of Charles II., she was still farther degraded by the paltry briberies of Walpole; and in the debasement of the Public the worst passions of the Individual came to light. The fine book of _Robinson_ exhibits the horrors of the terrible Lust of Strong Drink;--a terrible book, that, in which Medicine calls to its aid all the denunciations of Religion, and denounces the gloomy suicide of celibatism.