with the fury of its scorn. In a great gale the whole sea drives upon Nahant.

One day the storm came, sullen and showery from the East, scudding in blinding mists over the sea, breaking towards the blue, struggling, wailing, howling, losing the blue again, with a sharper chill in its breath and a drearier dash of the surf. Then

an awful lull, an impenetrable mist, and the hoarse gathering roar of the ocean. The day darkened, and sudden sprays of rain, like volleys of sharp arrows, rattled gustily against the windows, and dull, boom ing thunder was flattened and dispersed in the thick moisture of the air. But in the gust and pauses of the wind and rain, the bodeful roar of the sea was

constant and increasing. The water was invisible, except in the long flashing lines of surf that momently plunged from out the gray gloom of the fog, and that surf was like the advancing lines of an unknown enemy flinging itself upon the shore. Behind was the mighty rush of multitudinous waters, but more awful to imagination than any mere natural sound could be, for all the dead and lost, all who sailed and never came to shore, all who dreamed, and hoped, and struggled, and went down, and a world of joy with them; all their woe was in the Ocean's wail, the death shriek of as much happiness as lives. So the storm gathered terribly over the sea, in terror commensurate with the sea's vastness, and beat upon Nahant like a hail of fire upon a besieged citadel.

The next day, as children seek upon a battle-field, the buttons and ornaments that adorned the heroes, there were figures bending along the shore, to find the delicate, almost impalpable mosses, which the agony of the sea tosses up, as fragments of song drop from the torture of the heart. The mosses are pressed and cherished in volumes, each of which is a book of songs-of the airiest fancies-of the aptest symbols of the delicatest dreams of the sea. Nothing in nature is more touching and surprising, nothing more richly reveals her tenderness than these fair-threaded and infinitely various sea-weeds and

mosses. They are the still, small voices, in which is the Lord.

Longfellow has sung all this in wave-dancing music:

So when storms of wild emotion,

Strike the Ocean

Of the poet's soul, ere long

From each cave and rocky fastness,
In its vastness,

Floats some fragment of a Song.

From the far off Isles enchanted,
Heaven has planted

With the golden fruit of Truth;
From the flashing surf, whose vision
Gleams Elysian

In the tropic clime of Youth.

From the strong will and the endeavor,
That forever

Wrestles with the tides of Fate;

From the wreck of Hopes far-scattered,
Tempest-shattered,

Floating waste and desolate.

Ever-drifting, drifting, drifting,
On the shifting

Currents of the restless heart;
Till at length in books recorded,
They, like hoarded

Household words, no more depart.

Nahant would not satisfy a New Yorker, nor, indeed, a Bostonian, whose dreams of sea-side summering are based upon Newport life. The two places are entirely different. It is not quite true that Newport has all of Nahant and something more. For

the repose, the freedom from the fury of fashion, 16 precisely what endears Nahant to its lovers, and the very opposite is the characteristic of Newport.

Nahant is northern in character, and Newport is southern. The winds blow cool over Nahant, and you think of the North Sea, and Norsemen, and Vikings, and listen to the bracing winds as to Sagas.

Yet, if a man had any work to do, Nahant opens its arms to him, and folds him into the sweetest silence and seclusion. It has no variety, I grant. You stroll along the cliffs, and you gallop upon the beach, and there is nothing more. But he is a Tyro in the observation of Nature, who does not know that, by the sea, it is the sky-scape and not the landscape in which enjoyment lies. If a man dwelt in the vicinity of beautiful inland scenery, yet near the sea, his horse's head would be turned daily to the ocean, for the sea and sky are exhaustless in interest as in beauty, while, in the comparison, you soon drink up the little drop of satisfaction in fields and trees. The sea externally fascinates by its infinite suggestion, and every man upon the sea-shore is still a Julian or a Maddalo:

"because the sea

Is boundless as we wish our souls to be."

Besides, it is always the ocean which is the charın

of other shore resorts, that have more variety than Nahant. Even at Newport the eye is unsatisfied until it rests upon the sea, and as sea-side scenery with us is monotonous, there is rather more of the same thing at Newport than a greater variety. The genuine objection to Nahant is the feeling of its dulness, on the part of the young, and of its intense sadness of association with the elders.

The air is full of ghosts to them. At twilight they see figures glide pallid along the cliffs, and hear vague voices singing airy songs by moonlight in the rocky caves of the shore. Every stone, every turn is so familiar, that the absence of the look and the word, which in memory are integral parts of every rock and turn, sharpen the sense of change into acute

sorrow.

Nor to the visitor of to-day, who hears the stories of old Nahant days as he reads romances, is it possible to watch without tenderness of thought, even without a kind of sadness, if you will, the pleasant evening promenade along the Lynn Beach. They bound over the beach in the favoring sunset, those graceful forms, fresh and unworn as the sea that breaks languidly beside them and slips smoothly to their horses' hoofs. I do not wonder that it slips so softly toward them and touches their flight as with a musing kiss. I do not wonder that it breaks balmily