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"From Bermuda's reefs, from edges
Of sunken ledges,
On some far-off bright Azore;
From Bahama and the dashing,
Silver-flashing
Surges of San Salvador;

"From the trembling surf that buries
The Orkneyan Skerries,
Answering the hoarse Hebrides;
And from wrecks and ships and drifting
Spars, uplifting
On the desolate rainy seas;

"Ever drifting, drifting, drifting
On the shifting
Currents of the restless main."

But he was not thinking of this shore, when he added,—

"Till, in sheltered coves and reaches
Of sandy beaches,
All have found repose again."

These weeds were the symbols of those grotesque and fabulous thoughts which have not yet got into the sheltered coves of literature.

"Ever drifting, drifting, drifting
On the shifting
Currents of the restless heart,"
And not yet "in books recorded
They, like hoarded
Household words, no more depart."

The beach was also strewn with beautiful sea-jellies, which the wreckers called Sun-squall, one of the lowest forms of animal life, some white, some wine-colored, and a foot in diameter. I at first thought that they were a tender part of some marine monster, which the storm or some other foe had mangled. What right has the sea to bear in its bosom such tender things as sea-jellies and mosses, when it has such a boisterous shore, that the stoutest fabrics are wrecked against it? Strange that it should undertake to dandle such delicate children in its arm. I did not at first recognize these for the same which I had formerly seen in myriads in Boston Harbor, rising, with a waving motion, to the surface, as if to meet the sun, and discoloring the waters far and wide, so that I seemed to be sailing through a mere sun-fish soup. They say that when you endeavor to take one up, it will spill out the other side of your hand like quicksilver. Before the land rose out of the ocean, and became dry land, chaos reigned; and between high and low water mark, where she is partially disrobed and rising, a sort of chaos reigns still, which only anomalous creatures can inhabit. Mackerel-gulls were all the while flying over our heads and amid the breakers, sometimes two white ones pursuing a black one; quite at home in the storm, though they are as delicate organizations as sea-jellies and mosses; and we saw that they were adapted to their circumstances rather by their spirits than their bodies. Theirs must be an essentially wilder, that is, less human, nature than that of larks and robins. Their note was like the sound of some vibrating metal, and harmonized well with the scenery and the roar of the surf, as if one had rudely touched the strings of the lyre, which ever lies on the shore; a ragged shred of ocean music tossed aloft on the spray.