Water is at once the most potent and the most elastic of all forces, lending her aid to all the metamorphoses of our globe, covering, penetrating, transforming all around us. Into what frightful desert, into what gloomy forest, will not man penetrate in search of the healing springs which boil up from the bosom of the earth? What a perfectly superstitious belief we have in those springs which bring to us the hidden and healing virtues! I have seen fanatics who had no Deity but Carlsbad, that wonderful meeting of the most contradictory waters. I have seen the worshippers of Bareges, and I confess that I have myself submitted to the gushing and sulphureous waters of Acqui in their strange and almost animal pulsations. The hot baths of earth have no medium in their action; they are either certain health or certain death. How many sufferers who might have lingered through weeks, months, or even years, have been quickly slain by them! Frequently, those potent waters give a sudden revival, and, together with health, bring back the very passions which caused disease; passions hot as the waters which revived them. The very atmosphere above these sulphureous waters is intoxicating, the _aura_ of the Sybil that maddened her into Prophecy! An outburst which compels us to speak that which we would most conceal. And how terribly self-revealing we are in those Babels to which, under the plea of seeking health, we resort to throw aside the conventionalities, in too many cases the very decencies of Society. There, pale, worn sufferers, of both sexes, sit at the gaming table in eager passion to win gold, and, in reality, winning only an earlier Death. Very different is the saving breath of the great Sea; in itself it is a purifier. That never ceasing interchange of the ocean of air, and the ocean of water, forbids life ever to languish. Early and late, those oceans of air and sea are at work. At every instant each passes through the crucible of death--and at every instant revives. The whirlwind and the water spout give newer and stronger life to the vexed ocean. To live on land is to repose; to live on sea is to combat, and to combat savingly;--for those who can bear it, a Spartan training in which many perish, but those who survive are very strong.