f the island in the bay is usually but a coloured thought in the mind,
a phantom and an unattainable refuge by day, and a star by night, the
real coast which stretches seaward to it, marching on either hand into
the blue, confident and tall, is hardly more material, except by the
stones of my outlook. The near rocks are of indubitable earth.

Beyond them the coloured fabric of the bay becomes diaphanous, and I
can but wonder at the permanence of such a coast in this wind, for in
it the delicate cliffs and the frail tinted fields inclined above them
seem to tremble, as though they would presently collapse and tear from
their places and stream inland as torn flimsies and gossamer.

It is the sublimation of earth. Our own shining globe floats with the
others in a sea of light. Here in the bay on a September morning, if
our world till then had been without life and voice, with this shine
that is an impalpable dust of gold, the quickened air, and the seas
moving as though joyous in the first dawn, Eros and Aurora would have
known the moment, and a child would have been born.

None but the transcendent and mounting qualities of our elements, and
the generative day which makes the surf dazzling, and draws the
passionate azure of the bugloss from hot and arid sand, and makes the
blobs of sea-jelly in the pools expand like flowers, and ripens the
clouds, nothing but the indestructible essence of life, life uplifted
and dominant, shows now in this world of the bay.

Below the high moors which enclose the bay, those distant sleepy
uplands where the keels of the cumulus clouds are grounded, there are
saline meadows, lush and warm, where ditches serpentine between
barriers of meadowsweet, briers and fat grasses. Nearer to the sea the
levels are of moist sand covered with a close matting of thyme, and
herbage as close and resilient as moss, levels that are not green, like
fields, but golden, and of a texture that reflects the light, so that
these plains seem to have their own brightness.

The sea plains finish in the sandhills. In this desert you may press a
hand into the body of earth, and feel its heat and pulse. The west wind
pours among the dunes, a warm and heavy torrent. There is no need to
make a miracle of the appearance of life on our earth. Life was at the
happy incidence of the potent elements on such a strand as this.
Aphrodite was no myth. Our mother here gave birth to her.

The sea is kept from the dunes by a high