And since I have been idling at the window here,
the tide has risen. The boats are dancing on the bubbling water;
the colliers are afloat again; the white-bordered waves rush in;
the children
Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
When he comes back;
the radiant sails are gliding past the shore, and shining on the
far horizon; all the sea is sparkling, heaving, swelling up with
life and beauty, this bright morning.
OUR FRENCH WATERING-PLACE
HAVING earned, by many years of fidelity, the right to be sometimes
inconstant to our English watering-place, we have dallied for two
or three seasons with a French watering-place: once solely known to
us as a town with a very long street, beginning with an abattoir
and ending with a steam-boat, which it seemed our fate to behold
only at daybreak on winter mornings, when (in the days before
continental railroads), just sufficiently awake to know that we
were most uncomfortably asleep, it was our destiny always to
clatter through it, in the coupe of the diligence from Paris, with
a sea of mud behind us, and a sea of tumbling waves before. In
relation to which latter monster, our mind's eye now recalls a
worthy Frenchman in a seal-skin cap with a braided hood over it,
once our travelling companion in the coupe aforesaid, who, waking
up with a pale and crumpled visage, and looking ruefully out at the
grim row of breakers enjoying themselves fanatically on an
instrument of torture called 'the Bar,' inquired of us whether we
were ever sick at sea? Both to prepare his mind for the abject
creature we were presently to become, and also to afford him
consolation, we replied, 'Sir, your servant is always sick when it
is possible to be so.
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