FACES IN THE FIRE

It was a titanic struggle, and the waters won. That is the extraordinary thing—the waters won. The water seems so soft, so yielding, so fluid, and the rocks seem so impregnable, so adamantine, so immutable. Yet the waters always win. The land makes no impression on the sea; but the sea grinds the land to powder. I know that the sea is often spoken of as the natural emblem of all that is fickle and changeful; but it is a pure illusion. There are, of course superficial variations of tone and tint and temper; but, as compared with the kaleidoscopic changes that overtake the land, the ocean is eternally and everywhere the same. It, and not the rocks, is the symbol of immutability. ‘Look at the sea!’ exclaims Max Pemberton, in Red Morn. ‘How I love it! I like to think that those great rolling waves will go leaping by a thousand years from now. There is never any change about the sea. You never come back to it and say, “How it’s changed!” or “Who’s been building here?” or “Where’s the old place I loved?” No; it is always the same. I suppose if one stood here for a million years the sea would not be different. You’re quite sure of it, and it never disappoints you.’ The land, on the contrary, is forever changing. Man is always working his transformations, and Nature is toiling to the same end.‘When the Romans came to England,’ says Frank Buckland, the naturalist, ‘Julius Caesar probably looked upon an outline of cliff very different from that which holds our gaze to-day. First there comes a sun-crack along the edge of the cliff; the rainwater gets into the crack; then comes the frost. The rain-water in freezing expands, and by degrees wedges off a great slice of chalk cliff; down this tumbles into the water; and Neptune sets his great waves to work to tidy up the mess.’ No man can know the veriest rudiments of geology without recognizing that it is the land, and not the sea, that is constantly changing. We may visit some historic battlefield to-day, and, finding it a network of bustling streets and crowded alleys, may hopelessly fail to repeople the scene with the battalions that wheeled and charged, wavered and rallied, there in the brave days of old. But when, from the deck of a steamer, I surveyed the blue and tossing waters off Cape Trafalgar, I knew that I was gazing upon the scene just as it presented itself to the eye of Nelson on the day of his immortal victory and glorious death more than a century ago.