But what now is the sea-view from the shore, unfolding the magnificent results of many years of peace, corresponding with the shore-view from the sea, which has been described?

The commerce of the world is largely represented on our offing and in Massachusetts Bay. Outward bound and inward bound ships, barques and brigs, belonging to all sea-bordering lands, are almost daily seen from our own windows. Some are going to or coming from the distant East Indies

and Japan; some to or from Eastern or Western Africa, or the Cape of Good Hope; some to or from Asia Minor, or Egypt, or Southern Europe, or Northern Europe, or Great Britain; some to or from Brazil, Chili, Peru, California, the Sandwich Islands, Australia; and some to Borneo and other spicy islands of the Pacific sea. Often within view, added to these larger craft bearing rich cargoes and scented with foreign odors, are the countless smaller vessels of the Canadian Dominion and of our own coasting and fishing fleets; and, together with these, the steamships and steamboats that plough the Atlantic between Boston and Liverpool and other European ports; between Boston and the principal cities of Maine; and Boston and St. John's; and Boston and Halifax. Now and then comes a rare day for the display of white sails, when the pomp of peace on the sea is surveyed as excelling the grandest exhibition of naval warfare the world ever saw. There has been a week of storm, and all the harbors of Massachusetts Bay are crowded with vessels waiting for fair weather. At length the sky is clear, and the morning sun shines upon a thousand steaming decks. The wind blows steadily from the west. Presently the whole bay is covered with sails driving toward the open sea. After gaining the wide space of our offing, they disperse in splendid style, in all directions. Or the mackerel-fleets are busy with lines and nets in Ipswich Bay, and near

the Salvages. The observer on shore, sitting in his veranda, and sweeping with his vision from right to left the interesting spectacle, counts five or six hundred schooners.

One having a home by the sea is continually reminded of broad relationship and boundless society. While strengthened and deepened in local attachments, he is made more and more a cosmopolitan. If he travels far into the country and sojourns among the mountains, being a lover of Nature in all her forms and moods, and quick to discover and appreciate her grander or more beautiful arrangements, her wonderful though common lights and shadows, he readily, now and then, indulges the fancy that a house on some slope he sees, shielded from the north and east winds by lofty peaks, fronted by meadows through which there is a stretch of river into the distant southern horizon, and glorified at the close of every fair day by the rays of the descending sun, would be a delightful home; and he does not wonder that so many persons of abundant means retire from the artificial life of the closely packed towns, to enjoy the quiet pleasures of a place like this. And his fancy is not so wild as many would deem it; but he is not led away by it so far, that he loses the thought of the superlative advantages of his seaside habitation. He returns to the shore of the . heaving main, thinking that here he can have loneliness or society according to his wish. If, in the

ordinary sense he have no connection with neighborhood, he yet, in looking day by day upon the sea, will feel that he is in communication with the ends of the earth, that the pulse of the most distant lands give answer to his questioning touch, that he exchanges thought with a great brotherhood, not only in the gay fleets that so often pass his eye, and in the "sister commonwealths" of the continent behind him, and in the proud realms of Europe, but in far-away Hindostan, Sumatra, China, and Japan. Living by the sea, he is at once apart from the haunts of men, and a citizen of the world. At the "ocean's edge," he may, and does perhaps, go farther and see more than many who sail abroad. Thoreau reports him as singing this charming strain:

“My life is like a stroll upon the beach,

As near the ocean's edge as I can go;
My tardy steps its waves sometimes o'er-reach,
Sometimes I stay to let them overflow.

My sole employment 'tis, and scrupulous care,
To set my gains beyond the reach of tides,
Each smoother pebble and each shell more rare,
Which ocean kindly to my hand confides.

I have but few companions on the shore,

They scorn the strand who sail upon the sea;
Yet oft I think the ocean they've sailed o'er
Is deeper known upon the strand to me.

The middle sea contains no crimson dulse,
Its deeper waves cast up no pearls to view :
Along the shore my hand is on its pulse,

And I converse with many a shipwrecked crew."

FIRST SUMMER VISITORS.

About the time when Sandy Bay and Pigeon Cove were set off from Gloucester, and became the town of Rockport (1840), Richard H. Dana, Senior, looking for a pleasant summer retreat, found Pigeon Cove, and took up his abode here for the season. In 1842 William Cullen Bryant here joined his venerable friend, and spent the summer with him in delightful rambles on the shore, in the pastures, and in the woods. Mr. Brackett, the sculptor, also came, and moulded a bust of Mr. Bryant. That was a summer to be remembered by the village people; for men with seeing vision and acutest faculties and clearest utterance made a survey of their little seaside hamlet and its environs, interpreted the marvels all about them, and shed the light of their presence upon the common things of sea and land always within sight. Since then our woods have a charm which they did not seem to contain before: our ledges, crags, and boulders, mottled with moss; our hills and pastures, adorned with groves of pine and oak, and with patches of huckleberry and bayberry bushes; our bold and sloping granite shores, perpetually kept clean by the washings of the sea, have meaning and value far above the usual estimate which men set upon such possessions.