, broken and stilled in its tortuous way, till it ends with a
washing and dull hiss among the sea-weed, and, like a myriad of small
tinkling bells, the dripping from the crags is audible. There is fine
music in the sea!

And now the beach is bare. The cave begins to cool and darken, and the
first gold tint of sunset is stealing into the sky, and the sea looks
of a changing opal, green, purple, and white, as if its floor were
paved with pearl, and the changing light struck up through the waters.
And there heaves a ship into the horizon like a white-winged bird,
lying with dark breast on the waves, abandoned of the sea-breeze within
sight of port, and repelled even by the spicy breath that comes with a
welcome off the shore. She comes from "Merry England." She is
freighted with more than merchandise. The home-sick exile will gaze on
her snowy sail as she sets in with the morning breeze, and bless it,
for the wind that first filled it on its way swept through the green
valley of his home! What links of human affection brings she over the
sea? How much comes in her that is not in her "bill of lading," yet
worth to the heart that is waiting for it a thousand times the purchase
of her whole venture!

_Mais montons nous_! I hear the small hoofs of Thalaba; my stanhope
waits; we will leave this half bottle of champagne, that "remainder
biscuit," and the echoes of our philosophy to the Naiads who have lent
us their drawing-room. Undine, or Egeria! Lurly, or Arethusa!
whatever thou art called, nymph of this shadowy cave! adieu!

Slowly, Thalaba! Tread gingerly down this rocky descent! So! Here we
are on the floor of the vasty deep! What a glorious race-course! The
polished and printless sand spreads away before you as far as the eye
can see, the surf comes in below breast-high ere it breaks and the
white fringe of the sliding wave shoots up the beach, but leaves room
for the marching of a Persian phalanx on the sands it has deserted. O,
how noiselessly runs the wheel, and how dreamily we glide along,
feeling our motion but in the resistance of the wind and in the
trout-like pull of the ribands by the excited animal before us. Mark
the color of the sand! White at high-water mark, and thence deepening
to a silvery gray as the water has evaporated less, a slab of Egyptian
granite in the obelisk of St. Peter's not more polished and
unimpressible. Shell or rock, weed or quicksand, there is none; and,
mar or defac