an hour's walking, painful to me, the ground gently rose, and down in
the hollow a nest of poplars hid from the western gales. I took Father
Letheby through a secret path in the plantation. We rested a little
while, and talked of many things. Then we followed a tiny path, strewn
with withered pine needles, and which cut upward through the hill. We
passed from the shelter of the trees, and stood on the brow of a high
declivity. I never saw such surprise in a human face before, and such
delight. Like summer clouds sweeping over, and dappling a meadow,
sensations of wonder and ecstasy rolled visibly across his fine mobile
features. Then, he turned, and said, as if not quite sure of himself:--

"_Why! 't is the sea!_"

So it was. God's own sea, and his retreat, where men come but seldom,
and then at their peril. There the great ball-room of the winds and
spirits stretched before us, to-day as smooth as if waxed and polished,
and it was tessellated with bands of blue and green and purple, at the
far horizon line, where, down through a deep mine shaft in the clouds,
the hidden sun was making a silent glory. It was a dead sea, if you
will. No gleam of sail, near or afar, lit up its loneliness. No flash of
sea bird, poised for its prey, or beating slowly over the desolate
waste, broke the heavy dulness that lay upon the breast of the deep. The
sky stooped down and blackened the still waters; and anear, beneath the
cliff on which we were standing, a faint fringe of foam alone was proof
that the sea still lived, though its face was rigid and its voice was
stilled, as of the dead.

Father Letheby continued gazing in silence over the solemn scene for
some time. Then lifting his hat he said aloud:--

"Mirabiles elationes maris;
Mirabilis in altis Dominus!"

"Not very many 'upliftings' to-day," I replied. "You see our great
friend at a disadvantage. But you know she has moods: and you will like
her."

"Like her!" he replied. "It is not liking. It is worship. Some kind of
Pantheism which I cannot explain. Nowhere are the loneliness and
grandeur of God so manifested. Mind, I don't quite sympathize with that
comparison of St. Augustine's where he detects a resemblance between yon
spectra of purple and green and the plumage of a dove. What has a dove
to do with such magnificence and grandeur? It was an anti-climax, a
bathos, of which St. Augustine is seldom guilty. 'And the Spirit of God
moved upon the face of the waters