(and knew at once the authentic verse, and knew at once
for what tongue it had been really destined) in the pages of the prayer-
book of an apple-woman at an Innsbruck church, and in the accents of her
voice.

THE SEA WALL

A singular love of walls is mine. Perhaps because of childish
association with mountain-climbing roads narrow in the bright shadows of
grey stone, hiding olive trees whereof the topmost leaves prick above
into the blue; or perhaps because of subsequent living in London, with
its too many windows and too few walls, the city which of all capitals
takes least visible hold upon the ground; or for the sake of some other
attraction or aversion, walls, blank and strong, reaching outward at the
base, are a satisfaction to the eyes teased by the inexpressive peering
of windows, by that weak lapse and shuffling which is the London "area,"
and by the helpless hollows of shop-fronts.

I would rather have a wall than any rail but a very good one of wrought-
iron. A wall is the safeguard of simplicity. It lays a long level line
among the indefinite chances of the landscape. But never more majestic
than in face of the wild sea, the wall, steadying its slanting foot upon
the rock, builds in the serried ilex-wood and builds out the wave. The
sea-wall is the wall at its best. And fine as it is on the strong coast,
it is beautiful on the weak littoral and the imperilled levels of a
northern beach.

That sea wall is low and long; sea-pinks grow on the salt grass that
passes away into shingle at its foot. It is at close quarters with the
winter sea, when, from the low coast with its low horizon, the sky-line
of sea is jagged. Never from any height does the ocean-horizon show thus
broken and battered at its very verge, but from the flat coast and the
narrow world you can see the wave as far as you can see the water; and
the stormy light of a clear horizon is seen to be mobile and shifting
with the buoyant hillocks and their restless line.

Nowhere in Holland does there seem to be such a low sea-wall as secures
many a mile of gentle English coast to the east. The Dutch dyke has not
that aspect of a lowly parapet against a tide; it springs with a look of
haste and of height; and when you first run upstairs from the encumbered
Dutch fields to look at the sea, there is nothing in the least like
England; and even the Englishman of to-day is apt to share something of
the old perversity that was minded to