d itself at dawn,
the sea foaming forwards in thousands of billows. Along five miles of
seashore the white horses galloped forward against the rocks, as if
the whole sea were an army arrayed against the land. How the white
pennons flew!

Later in the morning I undressed, and sitting in moderate safety on a
shelf of rock, let the spent billows rush over me. The waves rushed
up the steep beach like tigers for their prey, their eyes turned away
from mine, but full of cruelty and anger. I was, deep in myself,
afear'd.

At what an extraordinary rate the waves rushed up the shore, fast
galloping after one another, accomplishing their fates! There is
only one line I know that tells well of their rate, that glory of
Swinburne:--

Where the dove dipped her wing and the oars won their way,
Where the narrowing Symplegades whiten the straits of Propontis
with spray.

III

At Osipovka, where I spent a whole long summer day sitting on a log on
the seashore, I saw a vision of the sea and nymphs--a party of peasant
girls came down and bathed. They were very pretty and frolicsome,
taking to the water in a very different style from educated women.
They were boisterous and wild. They went into the sea backwards, and
let the great waves knock them down; they lay down and were buffeted
by the surf; they ran about the shore, sang, shouted, yelled, waved
their arms; they dived headlong into the waves, swam hand over hand
among them, pulled one another by the legs. The sea does not know how
to play games: it seemed like an ogre with his twelve princesses. They
made sport of him, pulled his beard and his hair, tempted and evaded
him, mocked him when he grabbed at them, befooled him when he captured
them. I used to have an idea of nymphs behaving very artistically with
really drawing-room manners, but I saw I was wrong. Nymphs are only
artistic and alluring singly--one nymph on a rock before a gallant
prince.

In numbers they are absolutely wild and have no manners at all. Lucky
old ogre, to possess twelve such princesses, I thought; but as I
looked at the gleam of their limbs as they mocked, and heard their
hard laughter, I found him to be but a pitiable old greybeard, for he
looked at beauty that he could scarce comprehend and never possess.
The beauty of life has power greater than the beauty of the sea.

IV

One night after I had made my bed on a grassy sand-bank above the sea
and was waiting, in the thrilling and br