those days, Brighton covered but the borders of the shore. It
was scarcely more than a little line of fishermen's cottages, fenced
against the surge by the remaining timbers of boats which had long seen
their last adventure. Scattered at distances of at least a quarter of a
mile from each other, lay some houses of a better description, a few
deeply embosomed in trees, or rather in such thickets as could grow in
the perpetual exposure to the rough winds and saline exhalations of the
Channel. Of those, the one in which I had taken up my present residence
was amongst the best; though its exterior was so unpresuming, that I was
inclined to give Mordecai, or rather his gay heiress, credit for
humility, or perhaps for the refinement of striking their visiters with
the contrast between its simplicity of exterior and richness of
decoration within.

It was a brisk, bright morning, and the waves were curling before a
lively breeze, the sun was glowing above, and clusters of vessels,
floating down the Channel, spread their sails like masses of summer
cloud in the sunshine. It was my first sight of the ocean, and that
first sight is always a new idea. Alexander the Great, standing on the
shores of the Persian Gulf, said, "That he then first felt what the
world was." Often as I have seen the ocean since, the same conception
has always forced itself on me.

In what a magnificent world do we live! What power, what depth, what
expanse, lay before me! How singular, too, that while the grandeur of
the land arises from bold irregularity and incessant change of aspect,
from the endless variety of forest, vale, and mountain; the same effect
should be produced on the ocean by an absence of all irregularity and
all change! A simple, level horizon, perfectly unbroken, a line of
almost complete uniformity, compose a grandeur that impresses and fills
the soul as powerfully as the most cloud-piercing Alp, or the Andes
clothed with thunder.

This was the ocean in calm; but how glorious, too, in tempest! The storm
that sweeps the land is simply a destroyer or a renovator; it smites the
surface, and is gone. But the ocean is the seat of its power, the scene
of its majesty, the element in which it sports, lives, and
rules--penetrating to its depths, rolling its surface in thunder on the
shore--changing its whole motion, its aspect, its uses, and, grand as it
is in its serenity, giving it another and a more awful grandeur in its
convulsion. Then,