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 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, 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
around him, influenced by, and, in a sense, living upon them, and
surely might