That strange, that ever novel, that magical thing—the aspect of one's own land from the sea—is passing out of the literature of the English. I wonder why? I wondered at it the more last week when I went down the coast of Dorset and Devon in my boat under a brilliant sky with a happy north-east following wind and saw the splendid regiment of cliffs martialled in its vast curve eastward from Strait Point to that faint and doubtful wedge on the horizon which was Portland Bill.

Of landscape from within the land our modern literature has had far more than enough, a surfeit and a gorge of it. The theme came tumbling in with the French Revolution and fairly boiled over. But though our time has all in its favour for catching once again the marvel, the unique emotion, which fills a man when he sees his own land from the sea, for some reason the aspect is forgotten.

For one man that came into England from overseas and saw that sight in old days there are a hundred now. You may say that pretty well all the leisured class, which unhappily is the chief fabricator of verse and prose, has thus seen England. Yet in the verse and prose they fabricate I recollect but very little mention of the thing—and again I wonder why?

If a man were to waste himself upon mere description he could get no better matter for his pen, and none that should more fill his page. The incessant change; the splendid emphasis, now of this and now of that, upon the distant shore; the odd particularity, on a clear day, of details one would never hope to match inland; the vision, equally removed from common experience, of a vague something not to be seized when the mist plays with the coastline or when a haze in a hot noon covers the land; the invitation of harbours; the curious, unexpected, opening of points; the revelation of new things perpetually—all this goes nearly unexpressed. Now and then you get it in the way that is the best way to express any profound emotion in literature—I mean elliptically. Notably have you it in the splendid:

in writing which Newbolt left his country his debtor. But it is very rare indeed to-day.

There is in this aspect of land from the sea I know not what of continual discovery and adventure, and therefore of youth, or, if you prefer a more mystical term, of resurrection. That which you thought you knew so well is quite transformed, and as you gaze you begin to think of the people inhabiting the firm earth beyond that line of sand as some unknown and happy people; or, if you remember their arrangements of wealth and poverty and their ambitious follies, they seem not tragic but comic to you, thus isolated as you are on the waters and free from it all. You think of landsmen as on a stage. And, again, the majesty of the Land itself takes its true place and properly lessens the mere interest in one's fellows. Nowhere does England take on personality so strongly as from the sea.

Whether the cause be northern climate or some other thing, even height, the awfulness of land uplifted, which is so especially stirring to modern men and has produced the modern worship of mountains, seems to have a different and a greater quality when you adore it from the level of the seas. No inland effect of mountains that I have come across in my life (and I have come across many all over the world) can match that sight which so few have seen—the solemn amphitheatre of the Welsh giants standing in rank round the northern corner of Cardigan Bay. Yet, who has given us a picture of it? There may be such a picture somewhere, but at any rate it is not famous. The place is little visited by leisured sails for there is no harbour save Port Madoc, with a very difficult fairway, and shoal. The outer sea also is shoal, and there runs across it for miles, like a barrier, the causeway of St. Patrick, almost out of water, and having at its end the mournful tolling of a great bell. None have occasion, I suppose, to visit that triangle of our seas except those who trade for slate into the little haven. It is upon no track, the great steamers never visit it. You lie there in some summer calm, and those hills which are (by mere measurement) so small compared with the great ranges of Europe, not a third of the Alps or the Pyrenees, stand out as tremendously, or more tremendously, than the awful cliffs of Araxas or than that dreadful Gulf of Air beyond which, from the Jura, loom the peaks beyond Lake Leman. You seem, as you look on that embayed rank of mightiness and gloom, to lie there at anchor in the presence of great individual and lasting powers, of sentient and watching, though eternally silent, things.

And there is another landscape of the sea, which is that where two countries stand upon either side from the midway of a passage; it is a sight which explains history for one better than most things of travel. Often enough one is told, for instance, how the Irish hills of Wicklow can be caught from the Snowdon range or those of Wexford from the lesser heights of the south, the line of Pembrokeshire near Fishguard and St. David's. But I remember something which makes one realise the separation and the neighbourhood of the two islands far better than such an inland view: I remember how on a certain November day, very clear and frosty, with a touch of snow upon the hillsides, the Wexford heights and the Welsh stood equidistant from the deck; each plain and neighbourly, yet with all that sea between. Nor shall I ever forget a certain late evening in summer, twenty years ago, when the sun set upon an even sea line, flooding the dark water with crimson, and how Grisnez and the Kentish cliffs to the left and to the right gave to the narrows of the Channel the aspect of a great river mouth, so that one thought, as one gazed, of those wide mountain estuaries of the West, along the coast of the Pacific, where such a river as the Columbia swells down into the sea.

But of all those sacramental sights the chief is the landfall from very far away. When a man after days at sea first hesitates whether some tenuous outline or level patch barely perceived, a vast way off, is land or cloud and then comes to the moment of certitude and knows it for land, all his mind changes; the ship becomes a different thing; the world, which has been formless and simple, takes on at once name and character. He is back among human things.