all human minds the best emblem of unwearied, unconquerable
power the wild, various, fantastic, tameless unity of the sea;--what
shall we compare to this mighty, this universal element, for glory and
beauty? or how shall we follow its eternal changefulness of feeling?
It is like trying to paint a soul!

28. The great angel of the sea--rain; the angel, observe,--the
messenger sent to a special place on a special errand. Not the
diffused, perpetual presence of the burden of mist, but the going and
returning of the intermittent cloud. All turns upon that
intermittence. Soft moss on stone and rock; cave fern of tangled glen;
wayside well--perennial, patient, silent, clear, stealing through its
square font of rough-hewn stone; ever thus deep, no more;--which the
winter wreck sullies not, the summer thirst wastes not, incapable of
stain as of decline;--where the fallen leaf floats undecayed, and the
insect darts undefiling: cressed brook and ever-eddying river, lifted
even in flood scarcely over its stepping stones,--but through all
sweet summer keeping tremulous music with harp-strings of dark water
among the silver fingering of the pebbles. Far away in the south the
strong river gods have all hasted, and gone down to the sea. Wasted
and burning, white furnaces of blasting sand, their broad beds lie
ghastly and bare; but here in the moss lands, the soft wings of the
sea angel droop still with dew, and the shadows of their plumes falter
on the hills; strange laughings and glitterings of silver streamlets,
born suddenly, and twined about the mossy heights in trickling tinsel,
answering to them as they wave.

29. Stand for half an hour beside the fall of Schaffhausen, on the
north side, where the rapids are long, and watch how the vault of
water first bends unbroken, in pure polished velocity, over the
arching rocks at the brow of the cataract, covering them with a dome
of crystal twenty feet thick, so swift that its motion is unseen
except when a foam globe from above darts over it like a falling star;
and how the trees are lighted above it under all their leaves,[19] at
the instant that it breaks into foam; and how all the hollows of that
foam burn with green fire like so much shattering chrysoprase; and
how, ever and anon startling you with its white flash, a jet of spray
leaps hissing out of the fall, like a rocket, bursting in the wind and
driven away in dust, filling the air with light; and how through the
curdling