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.
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