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Beneath extends the broken line of shore, stretching north and south as far as the eye can travel, with its classic capes and islands basking in the strong sunshine; whilst behind the foam-fringed boundary of land and sea rises the jagged line of the Abruzzi Mountains with the huge snow-clad mass of the Gran Sasso d’Italia towering above the lower peaks.
How I loved and blessed those painters! how I thanked Creswick for every transparent shade-chequered pool; Fielding, for every rain-clad down; Cooper, for every knot of quiet cattle beneath the cool grey willows; Stanfield, for every snowy peak, and sheet of foam-fringed sapphire each and every one of them a leaf out of the magic book which else was ever closed to me.
And as when woodcutters cast in rows upon the beach long trees just hewn down by their axes, in order that, once sodden with brine, they may receive the strong bolts; so these monsters at the entrance of the foam-fringed harbour lay stretched one after another, some in heaps bending their heads and breasts into the salt waves with their limbs spread out above on the land; others again were resting their heads on the sand of the shore and their feet in the deep water, both alike a prey to birds and fishes at once.
Lo! of a sudden all that ocean turned to silver, a wide path of rippling silver stretched from it to them. It might have been the road of angels. The sweet soft light beat upon their ship, showing its tapering masts and every detail of the rigging. It passed on beyond them, and revealed the low, foam-fringed coast-line rising here and there, dotted with kloofs and their clinging bush.
Beside him green foam-fringed columns are rushing up the black rocks, and falling again in a thousand cataracts of snow.
At last we came to a little foam-fringed cay, where it was conceivable that the shyest and rarest of shells would choose to make its home a tiny aristocrat, driven out of the broad tideways by the coarser ambitions and the ruder strength of great molluscs that feed and grow fat and house themselves in crude convolutions of uncouthly striving horn; a little lonely shore, kissed with the white innocence of the sea, where pearls might secretly make themselves perfect, untroubled by the great doings of wind and tide merely rocked into beauty by ripple and beam, with a teardrop falling, once in a while, into their dim growing hearts, from some wavering distant star.
A keen, chilly wind swept fiercely over the rocks and along the shore, and the dark, foam-fringed waves rode grandly in upon the beach with a thunderous shock as they flew into spray. Some of the spray mist wet Noll's face, even as he stood upon the piazza steps. But, warmly clad, and loving the sight of the wild tumult, he started with a light heart for his walk up the shore.
Gleaming white houses rose one above another among feathery palms, with a broad streak of darker green in their midst to mark the shady alameda. Behind, the dark range towered against the sky; in front lay a foam-fringed beach and the vast blue sweep of dazzling sea.
They held on; and soon after day broke, with its first red flush ominously high in the eastern sky, they stretched in toward the land, with a somewhat sheltered bay opening up beyond a foam-fringed point ahead of them. Carroll glanced dubiously at the white turmoil in the midst of which black fangs of rock appeared. "Will she weather the point on this tack?" he asked. "She'll have to!
He sets her in backgrounds of foliage or of blue, foam-fringed torrents.