Glaucus; Or, The Wonders of the Shore

I speak from experience; for it was not so very long ago that, in the north of Devon, I found sermons, not indeed in stones, but in a creature reputed among the most worthless of sea-vermin. I had been lounging about all the morning on the little pier, waiting, with the rest of the village, for a trawling breeze which would not come. Two o’clock was past, and still the red mainsails of the skiffs hung motionless, and their images quivered head downwards in the glassy swell, “As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.” It was neap-tide, too, and therefore nothing could be done among the rocks. So, in despair, finding an old coast-guard friend starting for his lobster-pots, I determined to save the old man’s arms, by rowing him up the shore; and then paddled homeward again, under the high green northern wall, five hundred feet of cliff furred to the water’s edge with rich oak woods, against whose base the smooth Atlantic swell died whispering, as if curling itself up to sleep at last within that sheltered nook, tired with its weary wanderings. The sun sank lower and lower behind the deer-park point; the white stair of houses up the glen was wrapped every moment deeper and deeper in hazy smoke and shade, as the light faded; the evening fires were lighted one by one; the soft murmur of the waterfall, and the pleasant laugh of children, and the splash of homeward oars, came clearer and clearer to the ear at every stroke: and as we rowed on, arose the recollection of many a brave and wise friend, whose lot was cast in no such western paradise, but rather in the infernos of this sinful earth, toiling even then amid the festering alleys of Bermondsey and Bethnal Green, to palliate death and misery which they had vainly laboured to prevent, watching the strides of that very cholera which they had been striving for years to ward off, now re-admitted in spite of all their warnings, by the carelessness, and laziness, and greed of sinful man.