We were presently met by a breeze, which increased the swell, and made it easier to fail in close under the northern shore, a line of stupendous precipices, to which the ocean goes deep home.  The ride beneath these mighty cliffs was by far the finest boat-ride of my life.  While they do not equal the rocks of the Saguenay, yet, with all their appendages of extent, structure, complexion, and adjacent sea, they are sufficiently lofty to produce an almost appalling sense of sublimity.  The surges lave them at a great height, sliding from angle to angle, and fretting into foam as they slip obliquely along the face of the vast walls.  They descend as deeply as two hundred feet, and rise perpendicularly two, three, and four hundred feet from the water.  Their stratifications are up and down, and of different shades of light and dark, a ribbed and striped appearance that increases the effect of height, and gives variety and spirit to the surface.  At one point, where the rocks advance from the main front, and form a kind of headland, the strata, six and eight feet thick, assume the form of a pyramid,—­from a broad base of a hundred yards or more running up to meet in a point.  The heart of this vast cone has partly fallen out, and left the resemblance of an enormous tent with cavernous recesses and halls, in which the shades of evening were already lurking, and the surf was sounding mournfully.  Occasionally it was musical, pealing forth like the low tones of a great organ with awful solemnity.  Now and then, the gloomy silence of a minute was broken by the crash of a billow far within, when the reverberations were like the slamming of great doors.

After passing this grand specimen of the architecture of the sea, there appeared long rocky reaches like Egyptian temples,—­old, dead cliffs of yellowish gray, checked off by lines and seams into squares, and having the resemblance, where they have fallen out into the ocean, of doors and windows opening in upon the fresher stone.  Presently we came to a break, where there were grassy slopes and crags intermingled, and a flock of goats skipping about, or ruminating in the warm sunshine.  A knot of kids—­the reckless little creatures—­were sporting along the edge of a precipice in a manner almost painful to witness.  The pleasure of leaping from point to point, where a single misstep would have dropped them hundreds of feet, seemed to be in proportion to the danger.  The sight of some women, who were after the goats, reminded the boatmen of an accident which occurred here only a few days before:  a lad playing about the steep fell into the sea, and was drowned.