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Updated: June 6, 2025
They appear to have been generally in a bad state of repair, and records of their restoration are frequent. The sea-walls were thrown down by the Venetians, who did not like the cities under their sway to have defences on the water-side, though they were sometimes obliged to permit something of the sort.
From Athens all through the islands of the Grecian Archipelago, we saw little but forbidding sea-walls and barren hills, sometimes surmounted by three or four graceful columns of some ancient temple, lonely and deserted a fitting symbol of the desolation that has come upon all Greece in these latter ages.
From Athens all through the islands of the Grecian Archipelago, we saw little but forbidding sea-walls and barren hills, sometimes surmounted by three or four graceful columns of some ancient temple, lonely and deserted a fitting symbol of the desolation that has come upon all Greece in these latter ages.
Instances of this ceremony, where men were lowered into the water and drowned in order to make the sure foundation for bridges, piers or sea-walls, or where they were buried alive in the earth in order to lay the right bases for walls or castles, are quite numerous, and most of the local histories contain specific traditions.
It is only by the travail of the centuries that he has been taught to prefer to his own pleasure somebody else's absence of pain. Human nature is like Venice or Holland a province slowly wrested from the sea, and secured by dams and dykes. Woe to him who makes a breach in the sea-walls!
I had been thinking the white sea-walls of Etretal the finest thing conceivable in this way, but the huge red porphoritic-looking masses of St. Jouin have an even grander character. I have rarely seen anything more picturesque. They are strange, fantastic, out of keeping with the country, and for some rather arbitrary reason suggested to me a Spanish or even African landscape.
He could tell of the Curdled Sea, like milk set apart for cheese-making, which flowed as fast as a river, and brought down ghoulish beasts and great dragons in its tide. He told, too, of the Sea-walls which were the end of the world, waves higher than any mountain, which ringed the whole ocean. He had seen them, blue and terrible one dawn, before he had swung his helm round and fled southwards.
Marina grew faint and wide-eyed for terror, but they could not soothe her by word or touch; she sat with clasped hands, gasping for breath, listening to the low, long boom on the shores of the Lido, like muffled thunder, ceaselessly recurring the terrible noise of the great waves beating against the sea-walls beating and breaking in fury, tossing their spray high in air and whirling it in clouds, like rain mists, far across the lagoon.
Had we only the evidence of the deposits of rock heaped above each other in regular strata by the slow accumulation of materials, they alone would convince us of the long and slow maturing of God's work on the earth but when we add to these the successive populations of whose life this world has been the theatre, and whose remains are hidden in the rocks into which the mud or sand or soil of whatever kind on which they lived has hardened in the course of time, or the enormous chains of mountains whose upheaval divided these periods of quiet accumulation by great convulsions, or the changes of a different nature in the configuration of our globe, as the sinking of lands beneath the ocean, or the gradual rising of continents and islands above it, or the wearing of great river-beds, or the filling of extensive water-basins, till marshes first and then dry land succeeded to inland seas, or the slow growth of coral reefs, those wonderful sea-walls raised by the little ocean-architects whose own bodies furnish both the building-stones and the cement that binds them together, and who have worked so busily during the long centuries, that there are extensive countries, mountain-chains, islands, and long lines of coast consisting solely of their remains, or the countless forests that must have grown up, flourished, died, and decayed, to fill the storehouses of coal that feed the fires of the human race to-day, if we consider all these records of the past, the intellect fails to grasp a chronology for which our experience furnishes no data, and the time that lies behind us seems as much an eternity to our conception as the future that stretches indefinitely before us.
It cannot, indeed, be affirmed that human power is able to arrest altogether the incursions of the waves on sandy coasts, by planting the beach, and clothing the dunes with wood. On the contrary, both in Holland and on the French coast, it has been found necessary to protect the dunes themselves by piling and by piers and sea-walls of heavy masonry.
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