. Ocean was there,
all ready, asking no questions, answering none. What strange voyages,
downward through its glaucous depths, upwards to its boiling and
frothing surface, wafted by tides, driven by tempests, disparted by rude
agencies; one remnant whitening on the sands of a northern beach,
one perhaps built into the circle of a coral reef in the Pacific, one
settling to the floor of the vast laboratory where continents are built,
to emerge in far-off ages! What strange companions for my pall-bearers!
Unwieldy sea-monsters, the stories of which are counted fables by the
spectacled collectors who think their catalogues have exhausted nature;
naked-eyed creatures, staring, glaring, nightmare-like spectres of
the ghastly-green abysses; pulpy islands, with life in gelatinous
immensity,--what a company of hungry heirs at every ocean funeral! No!
No! Ocean claims great multitudes, but does not invite the solitary who
would fain be rid of himself.

"Shall I seek a deeper slumber at the bottom of the lake I love than I
have ever found when drifting idly over its surface? No, again. I do not
want the sweet, clear waters to know me in the disgrace of nature, when
life, the faithful body-servant, has ceased caring for me. That must not
be. The mirror which has pictured me so often shall never know me as an
unwelcome object.

"If I must ask the all-subduing element to be my last friend, and lead
me out of my prison, it shall be the busy, whispering, not unfriendly,
pleasantly companionable river.

"But Ocean and River and Lake have certain relations to the periods
of human life which they who are choosing their places of abode should
consider. Let the child play upon the seashore. The wide horizon gives
his imagination room to grow in, untrammelled. That background of
mystery, without which life is a poor mechanical arrangement, is shaped
and colored, so far as it can have outline, or any hue but shadow, on a
vast canvas, the contemplation of which enlarges and enriches the sphere
of consciousness. The mighty ocean is not too huge to symbolize the
aspirations and ambitions of the yet untried soul of the adolescent.

"The time will come when his indefinite mental horizon has found a solid
limit, which shuts his prospect in narrower bounds than he would have
thought could content him in the years of undefined possibilities. Then
he will find the river a more natural intimate than the ocean. It
is individual, which the ocean, wit