a northern beach, one perhaps built
into the circle of a coral reef in the Pacific, one settling to the floor
of the vast laboratory where continents are built, to emerge in far-off
ages! What strange companions for my pall-bearers! Unwieldy
sea-monsters, the stories of which are counted fables by the spectacled
collectors who think their catalogues have exhausted nature; naked-eyed
creatures, staring, glaring, nightmare-like spectres of the ghastly-green
abysses; pulpy islands, with life in gelatinous immensity,--what a
company of hungry heirs at every ocean funeral! No! No! Ocean claims
great multitudes, but does not invite the solitary who would fain be rid
of himself.

"Shall I seek a deeper slumber at the bottom of the lake I love than I
have ever found when drifting idly over its surface? No, again. I do
not want the sweet, clear waters to know me in the disgrace of nature,
when life, the faithful body-servant, has ceased caring for me. That
must not be. The mirror which has pictured me so often shall never know
me as an unwelcome object.

"If I must ask the all-subduing element to be my last friend, and lead me
out of my prison, it shall be the busy, whispering, not unfriendly,
pleasantly companionable river.

"But Ocean and River and Lake have certain relations to the periods of
human life which they who are choosing their places of abode should
consider. Let the child play upon the seashore. The wide horizon gives
his imagination room to grow in, untrammelled. That background of
mystery, without which life is a poor mechanical arrangement, is shaped
and colored, so far as it can have outline, or any hue but shadow, on a
vast canvas, the contemplation of which enlarges and enriches the sphere
of consciousness. The mighty ocean is not too huge to symbolize the
aspirations and ambitions of the yet untried soul of the adolescent.

"The time will come when his indefinite mental horizon has found a solid
limit, which shuts his prospect in narrower bounds than he would have
thought could content him in the years of undefined possibilities. Then
he will find the river a more natural intimate than the ocean. It is
individual, which the ocean, with all its gulfs and inlets and
multitudinous shores, hardly seems to be. It does not love you very
dearly, and will not miss you much when you disappear from its margin;
but it means well to you, bids you good-morning with its coming waves,
and good-evening with those which