edes from the shore, and at the instant that it encounters the
following breaker, the result is the vertical bound of both which is
here rendered by Turner. Such a recoiling wave will proceed out to sea
through ten or twelve ranges of following breakers, before it is
overpowered. The effect of the encounter is more completely and palpably
given in the Quilleboeuf, in the Rivers of France. It is peculiarly
instructive here, as informing us of the nature of the coast, and the
force of the waves, far more clearly than any spray about the rocks
themselves could have done. But the effect of the blow at the shore
itself is given in the Land's End, and vignette to Lycidas. Under
favorable circumstances, with an advancing tide under a heavy gale,
where the breakers feel the shore underneath them a moment before they
touch the rock, so as to nod over when they strike, the effect is nearly
incredible except to an eyewitness. I have seen the whole body of the
wave rise in one white, vertical, broad fountain, eighty feet above the
sea, half of it beaten so fine as to be borne away by the wind, the rest
turning in the air when exhausted, and falling back with a weight and
crash like that of an enormous waterfall. This is given most completely
in the Lycidas, and the blow of a less violent wave among broken rocks,
not meeting it with an absolute wall, along the shore of the Land's End.
This last picture is a study of sea whose whole organization has been
broken up by constant recoils from a rocky coast. The Laugharne gives
the surge and weight of the ocean in a gale, on a comparatively level
shore; but the Land's End, the entire disorder of the surges when every
one of them, divided and entangled among promontories as it rolls in,
and beaten back part by part from walls of rock on this side and that
side, recoils like the defeated division of a great army, throwing all
behind it into disorder, breaking up the succeeding waves into vertical
ridges, which in their turn, yet more totally shattered upon the shore,
retire in more hopeless confusion, until the whole surface of the sea
becomes one dizzy whirl of rushing, writhing, tortured, undirected rage,
bounding, and crashing, and coiling in an anarchy of enormous power,
subdivided into myriads of waves, of which every one is not, be it
remembered, a separate surge, but part and portion of a vast one,
actuated by internal power, and giving in every direction the mighty
undulation of impet