evel,
sandy beach:

"The crest of some slow-arching wave,
Heard in dead night along that table-shore,
Drops flat, and after the great waters break
Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves,
Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud,
From less and less to nothing."

As to the moods thus stimulated, the one most frequently
provoked would seem to be that of sadness. Or would it be truer
to say that those whose thoughts are tinged with melancholy, or
weighted with sorrow, find in the restless, endless tossing and
breaking of the waves their fittest companions?

How sad this passage from the French poet-philosopher, Guyot.
"I remember that once, sitting on the beach, I watched
the serried waves rolling towards me. They came without
interruption from the expanse of the sea, roaring and white.
Beyond the one dying at my feet I noticed another; and farther
behind that one, another; and farther still another and another--a
multitude. At last, as far as I could see, the whole horizon
seemed to rise and roll on towards me. There was a reservoir of
infinite, inexhaustible forces there. How deeply I felt the
impotency of man to arrest the effort of that whole ocean in
movement! A dike might break one of the waves; it could break
hundreds and thousands of them; but would not the immense
and indefatigable ocean gain the victory? And this rising tide
seemed to me the image of the whole of nature assailing
humanity, which vainly wishes to direct its course, to dam it in,
to master it. Man struggles bravely; he multiplies his efforts.
Sometimes he believes himself to be the conqueror. That is
because he does not look far enough ahead, and because he does
not notice far out on the horizon the great waves which, sooner
or later, must destroy his work and carry himself away."

Similar is the train of thought which finds poetical expression in
Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach."

"Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
. . .
Sophocles heard it long ago,
Heard it on the AEgaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of