I do not assert that in sober earnest he expects to be shown all these wonders at once, but he is under the tyranny of a mighty faculty, which haunts him with confused hints and shadows of all these; and when the actual object opens first upon him, seen (in tame weather too most likely) from our unromantic coasts—­a speck, a slip of sea-water, as it shows to him—­what can it prove but a very unsatisfying and even diminutive entertainment?  Or if he has come to it from the mouth of a river, was it much more than the river widening? and, even out of sight of land, what had he but a flat watery horizon about him, nothing comparable to the vast o’er-curtaining sky, his familiar object, seen daily without dread or amazement?—­Who, in similar circumstances, has not been tempted to exclaim with Charoba, in the poem of Gebir,—­

  Is this the mighty ocean?—­is this all?

I love town, or country; but this detestable Cinque Port is neither.  I hate these scrubbed shoots, thrusting out their starved foliage from between the horrid fissures of dusty innutritious rocks; which the amateur calls “verdure to the edge of the sea.”  I require woods, and they show me stunted coppices.  I cry out for the water-brooks, and pant for fresh streams, and inland murmurs.  I cannot stand all day on the naked beach, watching the capricious hues of the sea, shifting like the colours of a dying mullet.  I am tired of looking out at the windows of this island-prison.  I would fain retire into the interior of my cage.  While I gaze upon the sea, I want to be on it, over it, across it.  It binds me in with chains, as of iron.  My thoughts are abroad.  I should not so feel in Staffordshire.  There is no home for me here.  There is no sense of home at Hastings.  It is a place of fugitive resort, an heterogeneous assemblage of sea-mews and stock-brokers, Amphitrites of the town, and misses that coquet with the Ocean.  If it were what it was in its primitive shape, and what it ought to have remained, a fair honest fishing town, and no more, it were something—­with a few straggling fishermen’s huts scattered about, artless as its cliffs, and with their materials filched from them, it were something.  I could abide to dwell with Meschek; to assort with fisher-swains, and smugglers.  There are, or I dream there are, many of this latter occupation here.  Their faces become the place.  I like a smuggler.  He is the only honest thief.  He robs nothing but the revenue,—­an abstraction I never greatly cared about.  I could go out with them in their mackarel boats, or about their less ostensible business, with some satisfaction.  I can even tolerate those poor victims to monotony, who from day to day pace along the beach, in endless progress and recurrence, to watch their illicit countrymen—­townsfolk or brethren perchance—­whistling to the sheathing and unsheathing of their cutlasses (their only solace), who under the mild name of preventive service, keep up a legitimated civil warfare in the