nt monsters, to which
all that is terrible on earth--

Be but as buggs to frighten babes withal,
Compared with the creatures in the sea's entral;

of naked savages, and Juan Fernandez; of pearls, and shells; of coral
beds, and of enchanted isles; of mermaids' grots--

I do not assert that in sober earnest he expects to be shown all these
wonders at once, but he is under the tyranny of a mighty faculty,
which haunts him with confused hints and shadows of all these; and
when the actual object opens first upon him, seen (in tame weather too
most likely) from our unromantic coasts--a speck, a slip of sea-water,
as it shows to him--what can it prove but a very unsatisfying and
even diminutive entertainment? Or if he has come to it from the mouth
of a river, was it much more than the river widening? and, even out
of sight of land, what had he but a flat watery horizon about him,
nothing comparable to the vast o'er-curtaining sky, his familiar
object, seen daily without dread or amazement?--Who, in similar
circumstances, has not been tempted to exclaim with Charoba, in the
poem of Gebir,--

Is this the mighty ocean?--is this _all_?

I love town, or country; but this detestable Cinque Port is neither. I
hate these scrubbed shoots, thrusting out their starved foliage from
between the horrid fissures of dusty innutritious rocks; which the
amateur calls "verdure to the edge of the sea." I require woods, and
they show me stunted coppices. I cry out for the water-brooks, and
pant for fresh streams, and inland murmurs. I cannot stand all day on
the naked beach, watching the capricious hues of the sea, shifting
like the colours of a dying mullet. I am tired of looking out at the
windows of this island-prison. I would fain retire into the interior
of my cage. While I gaze upon the sea, I want to be on it, over it,
across it. It binds me in with chains, as of iron. My thoughts are
abroad. I should not so feel in Staffordshire. There is no home for me
here. There is no sense of home at Hastings. It is a place of fugitive
resort, an heterogeneous assemblage of sea-mews and stock-brokers,
Amphitrites of the town, and misses that coquet with the Ocean. If
it were what it was in its primitive shape, and what it ought to
have remained, a fair honest fishing town, and no more, it were
something--with a few straggling fishermen's huts scattered about,
artless as its cliffs, and with their materials filched from them, it
were someth