Descriptive letterpress printed opposite this photograph:

A WINTER SEA.

THE time for smoothly floating on the wavelets of a summer sea; of watching the play of light upon the smooth rocks and crags; of purple eves and golden sunsets, is past, and dark November brings other aspects to our rock-bound coast. It is the time of storm and mist, and rain-swirl, when the dark rocks seem to sullenly watch the silvery showers of spray that break in rapid succession at their feet, or listen to the dull thud of the breakers against the cliffs; and when the day is done, and all is shrouded from view, we look with pleasure in the direction of the white lighthouse standing far out to sea, and mark the bright flash of the gleaming light, and the succeeding pitchy darkness.

Far out runs a long reef of sharp-edged outliers, against which the wild waves seethe and curl in masses of white foam, now soaring up with the wolfish spring of a wild animal, now recoiling only to dash in again with renewed fury, to be again repulsed in broken clouds of salt sea spray. Each reef has its. story of winter storms, when brave ships have gone to pieces on those cruel teeth.

Over and above all other feeling there is a fascination in the terror belonging to the ocean⎯the sea-charm as it has been termed and the love of the sea and all that therein is, its mystery, and its dangers, often in a thoughtful, imaginative nature makes all inland scenery tame and insipid compared with the grandeur of the ever-changeful ocean.

The sense of vastness and power, its perpetual motion, its stormy passions and equally sudden calms, supply subjects of endless interest, as the restless sea rocks on, now crooning a cradle song, now rolling its storm-hymns across the deep.

The world’s greatest poets have fed their imagination upon its wonders. Shelley, who loved “all waste and solitary places,” loved still more his ” boat on the Serchio,” and some of his noblest inspirations came to him while thus employed.

In such portions of the coast as Skye and the Western Islands there is a distinct spiritual atmosphere pervading the whole district. The people are steeped in its influences, as their hills are in sea-mist and rain-cloud, and their songs are always mournful. We have often, while threading the intricacies of its gloomy lochs and winding channels, listened for hours together to the boatmen’s melancholy and monotonous chanting of interminable songs,

“Weird songs of foamy wraith and roaming sail,”

keeping time to the long lilt of the wave, and with a far-away look, and a wild light in their eyes, akin to the broken cloud-rifts, the ragged wind-swept cliffs, and ghostly peaks.

It is a wild life; but these splintered pinnacles growing sharp against the pale blue sky, the boom of the Atlantic waves breaking in the fantastic caverns scooped and hollowed out along the shore, the scream of the sea-mew, and the flight of the solitary scart, are sights and sounds dearer far to us than the vapid pleasures, the falsehood and veneer, of an artificial civilization.