It has its dark and bright days, its troubles from within, and its disturbances from without.

It often runs over ragged rocks with a smooth surface, and is vexed with ripples as it slides over sands that are level as a floor.

It betrays its various moods by aspects which are the commonplaces of poetry, as smiles and dimples and wrinkles and frowns.

Its face is full of winking eyes, when the scattering rain-drops first fall upon it, and it scowls back at the storm-cloud, as with knitted brows, when the winds are let loose.

It talks, too, in its own simple dialect, murmuring, as it were, with busy lips all the way to the ocean, as children seeking the mother's breast and impatient of delay.