The Great Galveston Disaster / Containing a Full and Thrilling Account of the Most Appalling Calamity of Modern Times Including Vivid Descriptions of the Hurricane and Terrible Rush of Waters; Immense Destruction of Dwellings, Business Houses, Churches, and Loss of Thousands of Human Lives; Thrilling Tales of Heroic Deeds; Panic-Stricken Multitudes and Heart-Rending Scenes of Agony; Frantic Efforts to Escape a Horrible Fate; Separation of Loved Ones, etc., etc.; Narrow Escapes from the Jaws of Death; Terrible Sufferings of the Survivors; Vandals Plundering Bodies of the Dead; Wonderful Exhibitions of Popular Sympathy; Millions of Dollars Sent for the Relief of the Stricken Sufferers

by Paul Lester

BELIEVED THE SEA HAD CONCEALED A LAND.

The Greek philosopher located it off the shores of North Africa, a little to the southwest of Gibraltar. The Platonian description of the interior of the Atlantis of ancient times is surpassingly beautiful, but not more so than the rare imaginative power with which Plato writes of the country and its people, a most fabulous and engaging history.

All this, of course, is the work of pure fancy, and only important, beyond the fact that it is the work of Plato, as showing how deeply the conviction had taken hold upon the mind of that age that the sea had taken away a land which the ancients knew as the western shore of the Atlantic Ocean, and had left nothing but a boundless waste of waters west of Europe. Speculators have located the lost Atlantis near the Canary Islands, and these islands are, in fact, supposed to be the remnants of the lost continent. There is positively nothing tangible upon which to hang the story of the lost Atlantis.

But, like most traditions which persist in living on after the world has grown too practical to have any more use for them, it has, doubtless, a foundation in some important fact of olden time, the tragedy of which was in that sacrifice of the earth to the waters of the deep, which had become familiar even to the ancients. Byron’s apostrophe to the ocean is so singularly powerful and beautiful because it expresses that awe and fear of man for the sea which is an instinct with us, and which, if it had not been instinct with us at the first, would have become so through the many and heavy afflictions visited upon the race by Neptune, god of the sea.