It is strange to pass from these monumental moors straight to the sea which records the moments, not the years or the centuries. In fine weather especially its colour--when, for example, it is faintly corrugated and of a blue that melts towards the horizon into such a hue that it is indistinguishable from the violet wall of dawn--is a perpetual astonishment on account of its unearthliness and evanescence. The mind does not at once accept the fact that here underneath our eyes is, as it were, another sky. The physical act of looking up induces a special mood of solemnity and veneration, and during the act the eyes meet with a fitting object in the stainless heavens. Looking down we are used to seeing the earth, the road, the footpath, the floor, the hearth; but when, instead, it is the sea and not any of these things, although our feet are on firm land, the solemnity is of another kind. In its anger the sea becomes humanized or animalized: we see resemblances to familiar things. There is, for instance, an hour sometimes after sunset, when the grey sky coldly lights the lines of white plumes on a steely sea, and they have an inevitable likeness to a trampling chivalry that charges upon a foe. But a calm sea is incomparable except to moods of the mind. It is then as remote from the earth and earthly things as the sky, and the remoteness is the more astonishing because it is almost within our grasp. It is no wonder that a great idea was expressed by the fortunate islands in the sea. The youthfulness, the incorruptibility of the sea, continually renewing itself, the same from generation to generation, prepares it as a fit sanctuary of the immortal dead. So at least we are apt to think at certain times, coming from the heavy, scarred, tormented earth to that immense aëry plain of peacock blue. And yet at other times that same unearthliness will suggest quite other thoughts. It has not changed and shrunken and grown like the earth; it is not sun-warmed: it is a monster that has lain unmoved by time, sleeping and moaning outside the gates within which men and animals have become what they are. Actually that cold fatal element and its myriad population without a sound brings a wistfulness into the mind as if it could feel back and dimly recall the dawn of time when the sea was incomprehensible and impassable, when the earth had but lately risen out of the waters and was yet again to descend beneath: it becomes a type of the waste where everything is unknown or uncertain except death, pouring into the brain the thoughts that men have had on looking out over untrodden mountain, forest, swamp, in the drizzling dawn of the world. The sea is exactly what it was when mountain, forest, swamp were imperturbable enemies, and the sight of it restores the ancient fear. I remember one dawn above all others when this restoration was complete. When it was yet dark the wind rose gustily under a low grey sky and a lark sang amidst