I love the sea, in rest or unrest.
It is never monotonous to me, as some find it; for I think it ever-changing, ever new. I love it always—under every aspect of its kaleidoscopic face.
When, bright with mellow sunshine, it reflects the intense blue of the ocean sky above, with a brisk breeze topping its many-furrowed waves—that are racing by and leaping over each other like a parcel of schoolboys at play—and cutting off sheets and sparkling showers of the prismatic foam that exhibits every tint of the rainbow—azure and orange, violet, light-green, and pale luminous white,—scatters it broadcast into the air around; whence it falls into yeasty hollows, a sort of feathery snow of a fairy texture, just suited for the bridal veils of the Nereides—only to be churned over again and tossed up anew by the wanton wind in its frolicsome mirth.
Or, when, in a dead calm, it appears to lie sleeping, heaving its tumid bosom in occasional long-drawn sighs—that make it rise and sink in rounded ridges of an oily look and a leadeny tinge, except at the equator, where they shine at midday like a burnished mirror.
Or, again, when storm-tossed and tempest-weary, it rages and raves with all its pent-up fury broken loose—goaded to frenzy by the howling lashes of Aeolus and the roar of the storm-fiend. Then it is grand and awful in its majesty; and when I see it so it makes me mad with a triumphant sense of power in overriding it—as it boils beneath the vessel’s keel, longing to overwhelm it and me, yet impotent of evil!
Whether in calm or in storm—at dawn of day, with the rosy flush of the rising sun blushing the horizon up to the zenith, or at night, with the twinkling stars shining down into its sombre depths and the recurring flashes of sheet lightning lighting up its immensity, which seems vaster as the darkness grows—it is to me always attractive, ever lovable.
In its bright buoyancy it exhilarates me; in its calm, it causes me to dream; and, in its wild moods, when heaven and sea appear to meet together in wrestling embrace, I can—if joyous at the time—almost shout aloud in ecstasy of admiring awe and kindred riot of mind; while, should I feel sad during the carnival of the elements, I get reflective, and—
“As I watch the ocean
In pitiless commotion,
Like the thoughts, now surging wildly through my storm-tost breast,
The snow-capt, heaving billows
Seem to me as lace-fring’d pillows
Of the deep Deep’s bed of rest!”
Did you ever chance to read Châteaubriand’s Génie du Christianisme?
It is a queer book for a Frenchman to have written, but abounding in beautiful description and startling bits of observation. I remember, one evening on the passage out, when it was very rough, having a particular sentence of this work especially called to my mind. It was that in which the author discourses on the Deity, and says,—