ways on the verge of unexplored oceans. We crawl along the endless beach, the product of sea slime, with here and there a wreck or fisher’s house and a few pikes and shad poles, the waves, like untamable sea monsters, ever rolling to the land, spotted with oranges and limes, the waste of a demonic commerce. It is a vast, rank, lusty place, this beach of ours, strewn with horseshoes and crabs, and razor-clams, and whatever wrecks the sea casts up; corpses of men and beasts bleaching and rotting in the sun and waves,—and each tide turns them in their beds, and brings fresh sand to be their pillows.
Between the traveller and the setting sun,
Upon some drifting sand heap of the shore,
A hound stands o’er the carcass of a man.
"Yet there are some delicate ocean flowers and fragile mosses which, if you wade in, you may lift up gently upon a paper, and prick out painfully with a needle."
In the "Sunday" at page 95 of The Week, there is mention of a reproof given to Thoreau by a "minister driving a poor beast to some horse-sheds." This was not on the
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