the naked beach, watching the capricious hues of the sea, shifting
like the colours of a dying mullet. I am tired of looking out at the
windows of this island-prison. I would fain retire into the interior
of my cage. While I gaze upon the sea, I want to be on it, over it,
across it. It binds me in with chains, as of iron. My thoughts are
abroad. I should not so feel in Staffordshire. There is no home for me
here. There is no sense of home at Hastings. It is a place of fugitive
resort, an heterogeneous assemblage of sea-mews and stock-brokers,
Amphitrites of the town, and misses that coquet with the Ocean. If
it were what it was in its primitive shape, and what it ought to
have remained, a fair honest fishing town, and no more, it were
something--with a few straggling fishermen's huts scattered about,
artless as its cliffs, and with their materials filched from them, it
were something. I could abide to dwell with Meschek; to assort with
fisher-swains, and smugglers. There are, or I dream there are, many
of this latter occupation here. Their faces become the place. I like
a smuggler. He is the only honest thief. He robs nothing but the
revenue,--an abstraction I never greatly cared about. I could go out
with them in their mackarel boats, or about their less ostensible
business, with some satisfaction. I can even tolerate those poor
victims to monotony, who from day to day pace along the beach,
in endless progress and recurrence, to watch their illicit
countrymen--townsfolk or brethren perchance--whistling to the
sheathing and unsheathing of their cutlasses (their only solace), who
under the mild name of preventive service, keep up a legitimated civil
warfare in the deplorable absence of a foreign one, to show their
detestation of run hollands, and zeal for old England. But it is the
visitants from town, that come here to _say_ that they have been here,
with no more relish of the sea than a pond perch, or a dace might be
supposed to have, that are my aversion. I feel like a foolish dace