ng-boats. The clear, heavy
water-edge of ocean rising and falling close to their bows, in that
unaccountable way which the sea has always in calm weather, turning the
pebbles over and over as if with a rake, to look for something, and then
stopping a moment down at the bottom of the bank, and coming up again
with a little run and clash, throwing a foot's depth of salt crystal in
an instant between you and the round stone you were going to take in
your hand; sighing, all the while, as if it would infinitely rather be
doing something else. And the dark flanks of the fishing-boats all
aslope above, in their shining quietness, hot in the morning sun, rusty
and seamed with square patches of plank nailed over their rents; just
rough enough to let the little flat-footed fisher-children haul or twist
themselves up to the gunwales, and drop back again along some stray
rope; just round enough to remind us, in their broad and gradual curves,
of the sweep of the green surges they know so well, and of the hours
when those old sides of seared timber, all ashine with the sea, plunge
and dip into the deep green purity of the mounded waves more joyfully
than a deer lies down among the grass of spring, the soft white cloud of
foam opening momentarily at the bows, and fading or flying high into the
breeze where the sea-gulls toss and shriek,--the joy and beauty of it,
all the while, so mingled with the sense of unfathomable danger, and the
human effort and sorrow going on perpetually from age to age, waves
rolling forever, and winds moaning forever, and faithful hearts trusting
and sickening forever, and brave lives dashed away about the rattling
beach like weeds forever; and still at the helm of every lonely boat,
through starless night and hopeless dawn, His hand, who spread the
fisher's net over the dust of the Sidonian palaces, and gave into the
fisher's hand the keys of the kingdom of heaven.

Next after the fishing-boat--which, as I said, in the architecture of
the sea represents the cottage, more especially the pastoral or
agricultural cottage, watchful over some pathless domain of moorland or
arable, as the fishing-boat swims, humbly in the midst of the broad
green fields and hills of ocean, out of which it has to win such fruit
as they can give, and to compass with net or drag such flocks as it may
find,--next to this ocean-cottage ranks in interest, it seems to me, the
small, over-wrought, under-crewed, ill-caulked merchant brig