"Swallow's Cave." The floor descends by a
gentle declivity to the sea, and from the long dark cleft stretching
outward you look forth upon the Atlantic--the shore of Ireland the
first _terra firma_ in the path of your eye. Here is a dark pool, left
by the retreating tide for a refrigerator; and with the champagne in
the midst we will recline about it like the soft Asiatics of whom we
learned pleasure in the East, and drink to the small-featured and
purple-lipped "Mignons" of Syria--those fine-limbed and fiery slaves
adorable as peris, and by turns languishing and stormy, whom you buy
for a pinch of piastres (say 5L 5s.) in sunny Damascus. Your drowsy
Circassian, faint and dreamy, or your crockery Georgian--fit dolls for
the sensual Turk--is, to him who would buy _soul_, dear at a penny the
hecatomb.

We recline, as it were, in an ebon pyramid with a hundred feet of floor
and sixty of wall, and the fourth side open to the sky. The light
comes in mellow and dim, and the sharp edges of the rocky portal seem
let into the pearly heaven. The tide is at half-ebb, and the advancing
and retreating waves, which at first just lifted the fringe of crimson
dulse at the lip of the cavern, now dash their spray-pearls on the rock
below, the "tenth" surge alone rallying as if in scorn of its
retreating fellow, and, like the chieftain of Culloden Moor, rushing
back singly to the contest. And now that the waters reach the entrance
no more, come forward and look on the sea! The swell lifts! Would you
not think the bases of the earth rising beneath it? It falls! Would
you not think the foundation of the deep had given way? A plain, broad
enough for the navies of the world to ride at large, heaves up evenly
and steadily as if it would lie against the sky, rests a moment
spell-bound in its place, and falls again as far--the respiration of a
sleeping child not more regular and full of slumber. It is only on the
shore that it chafes. Blessed emblem! it is at peace with itself! The
rocks war with a nature so unlike their own, and the hoarse din of
their border onsets resounds through the caverns they have rent open;
but beyond, in the calm bosom of the ocean, what heavenly dignity! what
godlike unconsciousness of alarm! I did not think we should stumble on
such a moral in the cave!

By the deeper bass of its hoarse organ the sea is now playing upon its
lowest stops, and the tide is down. Hear how it rushes in beneath the
rocks