moment. It will not do
so, I know; but there is an infinite possibility about the sea; it may
do what it is not recorded to have done. It is not to be ordered, it may
overleap the bounds human observation has fixed for it. It has a potency
unfathomable. There is still something in it not quite grasped and
understood--something still to be discovered--a mystery.

So the white spray rushes along the low broken wall of rocks, the sun
gleams on the flying fragments of the wave, again it sinks and the
rhythmic motion holds the mind, as an invisible force holds back the
tide. A faith of expectancy, a sense that something may drift up from
the unknown, a large belief in the unseen resources of the endless space
out yonder, soothes the mind with dreamy hope.

The little rules and little experiences, all the petty ways of narrow
life, are shut off behind by the ponderous and impassable cliff; as if
we had dwelt in the dim light of a cave, but coming out at last to look
at the sun, a great stone had fallen and closed the entrance, so that
there was no return to the shadow. The impassable precipice shuts off
our former selves of yesterday, forcing us to look out over the sea
only, or up to the deeper heaven.

These breadths draw out the soul; we feel that we have wider thoughts
than we knew; the soul has been living, as it were, in a nutshell, all
unaware of its own power, and now suddenly finds freedom in the sun and
the sky. Straight, as if sawn down from turf to beach, the cliff shuts
off the human world, for the sea knows no time and no era; you cannot
tell what century it is from the face of the sea. A Roman trireme
suddenly rounding the white edge-line of chalk, borne on wind and oar
from the Isle of Wight towards the gray castle at Pevensey (already old
in olden days), would not seem strange. What wonder could surprise us
coming from the wonderful sea?

The little rills winding through the sand have made an islet of a
detached rock by the beach; limpets cover it, adhering like rivet-heads.
In the stillness here, under the roof of the wind so high above, the
sound of the sand draining itself is audible. From the cliff blocks of
chalk have fallen, leaving hollows as when a knot drops from a beam.
They lie crushed together at the base, and on the point of this jagged
ridge a wheatear perches.

There are ledges three hundred feet above, and from these now and then a
jackdaw glides out and returns again to his place, where,