orange-tinted heavens. For him all-glorious fetes were celebrated at
sundown when the star of day poured its red colors on the waves in a
crimson flood. For him the sea was gay and sparkling and spirited when
it quivered in repeating the noonday light from a thousand dazzling
facets; to him it revealed its wondrous melancholy; it made him weep
whenever, calm or sad, it reflected the dun-gray sky surcharged with
clouds. He had learned the mute language of that vast creation. The flux
and reflux of its waters were to him a melodious breathing which uttered
in his ear a sentiment; he felt and comprehended its inward meaning.
No mariner, no man of science, could have predicted better than he the
slightest wrath of the ocean, the faintest change on that vast face. By
the manner of the waves as they rose and died away upon the shore, he
could foresee tempests, surges, squalls, the height of tides, or calms.
When night had spread its veil upon the sky, he still could see the sea
in its twilight mystery, and talk with it. At all times he shared
its fecund life, feeling in his soul the tempest when it was angry;
breathing its rage in its hissing breath; running with its waves as
they broke in a thousand liquid fringes upon the rocks. He felt himself
intrepid, free, and terrible as the sea itself; like it, he bounded and
fell back; he kept its solemn silence; he copied its sudden pause. In
short, he had wedded the sea; it was now his confidant, his friend. In
the morning when he crossed the glowing sands of the beach and came upon
his rocks, he divined the temper of the ocean from a single glance; he
could see landscapes on its surface; he hovered above the face of
the waters, like an angel coming down from heaven. When the joyous,
mischievous white mists cast their gossamer before him, like a veil
before the face of a bride, he followed their undulations and caprices
with the joy of a lover. His thought, married with that grand expression
of the divine thought, consoled him in his solitude, and the thousand
outlooks of his soul peopled its desert with glorious fantasies. He
ended at last by divining in the motions of the sea its close communion
with the celestial system; he perceived nature in its harmonious whole,
from the blade of grass to the wandering stars which seek, like seeds
driven by the wind, to plant themselves in ether.

Pure as an angel, virgin of those ideas which degrade mankind, naive as
a child, he lived like