|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 27
Emerson says: "Whilst common sense looks at things or visible nature as
real and final facts, poetry, or the imagination which dictates it, is
a second sight, looking through these, and using them as types or words
for thoughts which they signify." Using these faculties and not mere
eyesight, one must surely say: "Since this world, in power, fineness,
finish, beauty, and adaptations not only surpasses our accomplishment,
but also is past our finding out to its perfection, it must have been
made by One stronger, finer, and wiser than we are."
SEA SCULPTURE*
*Reprinted from _The Chautauquan_.
When the Russians charged on the Grivitza redoubt at Plevna they first
launched one column of men that they knew would be all shot down long
before they could reach it. But they made a cloud of smoke under the
cover of which a second column was launched. They would all be shot
down. But they carried the covering cloud so far that a third column
broke out of it and successfully carried the redoubt. They carried it,
but ten thousand men lay on the death-smitten slope.
So the great ocean sends eight or ten thousand columns a day to charge
with flying banners of spray on the rocky ramparts of the shore at
Santa Cruz, California.
There are not many things in the material world more sublime than a
thousand miles of crested waves rushing with terrible might against the
rocky shore. While they are yet some distance from the land a small
boat can ride their foaming billows, but as they approach the shallower
places they seem to take on sudden rage and irresistible force. Those
roaring waves rear up two or three times as high. They have great
perpendicular fronts down which Niagaras are pouring. The spray flies
from their tops like the mane of a thousand wild horses charging in the
wind. No ship can hold anchor in the breakers. They may dare a
thousand storms outside, but once let them fall into the clutch of this
resistless power and they are doomed. The waves seem frantic with
rage, resistless in force; they rush with fury, smite the cliffs with
thunder, and are flung fifty feet into the air; with what effect on the
rocks we will try to relate.
[Illustration: "The Breakers," Santa Cruz, Cal.]
No. 1 of our illustrations shows "The Breakers," a two-story house of
that name where hospitality, grace, and beauty abide; where hundreds of
roses bloom in a day, and where flowers, prodigal as creative
processes, abound. The breakers from which the house is named are not
seen in the picture. When the wind has been blowing hard, maybe one
hundred miles out at sea, they come racing in from the point,
feather-crested, a dozen at once, to show how rolls the far Wairoa at
some other world's end. All these pictures are taken in the calm
weather, or there would be little seen besides the great leaps of
spray, often fifty feet high. At the bottom of the cliff appear the
nodules and bowlders that were too hard to be bitten into dust and have
fallen out of the cliff, which is fifty feet high, as the sea eats it
away. Some of these are sculptured into the likeness effaces and
figures, solemn and grotesque. It is easy to find Pharaoh, Cleopatra,
Tantalus, represented here.
This house is at the beginning of the famous Cliff Drive that rounds
the lighthouse at the point and stretches away for miles above the
ever-changing, now beautiful, now sublime, and always great Pacific,
that rolls its six thousand miles of billows toward us from Hong Kong.
Occasionally the road must be set back, and once the lighthouse was
moved back from the cliffs, eaten away by the edacious tooth of the sea.
As Emerson says, "I never count the hours I spend in wandering by the
sea; like God it useth me." There is a wideness like his mercy, a
power like his omnipotence, a persistence like his patience, a length
of work like his eternity.
The rocks of Santa Cruz, as in many other places, were laid in regular
order, like the leaves of a book on its side. But by various forces
they have been crumbled, some torn out, and in many places piled
together. These layers, beginning at the bottom, are as follows; (1)
igneous granite, unstratified; (2) limestone laid down from life in the
ocean, metamorphosed by heat and all fossils thereby destroyed; (3)
limestone highly crystallized, composed of fossil shells and very hard;
(4) sandstone, made under the sea from previous rock powdered, having
huge concretionary masses with a shell or a pebble as a nucleus around
which the concretion has taken place; (5) shale from the sea also; (6)
conglomerate, or drift, deposited by ice in the famous glacial cold
snap; (7) alluvium soil deposited in fresh water and composed partly of
organic matter. In our second illustration some of these layers, or
strata, may be distinguished.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|