ess element which left, one
hardly a foot-space amidst the yielding sand; of the old beds of lost
rivers, surviving now only as deeper channels in the sea; of the
remains of a certain ancient town, which within men's memory had lost
its few remaining inhabitants, and, with its already empty tombs,
dissolved and disappeared in the flood.

It happened, on occasion of an exceptionally low tide, that some
remarkable relics were exposed to view on the coast of the island of
Vleeland. A countryman's waggon overtaken [94] by the tide, as he
returned with merchandise from the shore! you might have supposed, but
for a touch of grace in the construction of the thing--lightly wrought
timber-work, united and adorned by a multitude of brass fastenings,
like the work of children for their simplicity, while the rude, stiff
chair, or throne, set upon it, seemed to distinguish it as a chariot of
state.

To some antiquarians it told the story of the overwhelming of one of
the chiefs of the old primeval people of Holland, amid all his gala
array, in a great storm. But it was another view which Sebastian
preferred; that this object was sepulchral, namely, in its motive--the
one surviving relic of a grand burial, in the ancient manner, of a king
or hero, whose very tomb was wasted away.--Sunt metis metae! There came
with it the odd fancy that he himself would like to have been dead and
gone as long ago, with a kind of envy of those whose deceasing was so
long since over.

On more peaceful days he would ponder Pliny's account of those primeval
forefathers, but without Pliny's contempt for them. A cloyed Roman
might despise their humble existence, fixed by necessity from age to
age, and with no desire of change, as "the ocean poured in its flood
twice a day, making it uncertain whether the country was a part of the
continent or of the sea." But for his part Sebastian found something
of poetry in all that, [95] as he conceived what thoughts the old
Hollander might have had at his fishing, with nets themselves woven of
seaweed, waiting carefully for his drink on the heavy rains, and taking
refuge, as the flood rose, on the sand-hills, in a little hut
constructed but airily on tall stakes, conformable to the elevation of
the highest tides, like a navigator, thought the learned writer, when
the sea was risen, like a ship-wrecked mariner when it was retired.
For the fancy of Sebastian he lived with great breadths of calm light
above and a