"And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy
Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Borne like thy bubbles onward: from a boy
I wantoned with thy breakers."
What is the core of this Viking buoyancy and exhilaration? Surely a sense of freedom, inspired by a life on the ocean, and fostered by the very hardships and dangers which that life entails.
Thus cumulative is the evidence that the present, for all its materialism, inherits the essence of the ancient mysticism; or rather, it is open to the same impulses and intuitions, however changed and changing the forms they may assume. On the one hand, the infinite complexity of man's developing soul-life; on the other, the limitless range of the moods and aspects of the ocean: the two are spiritually linked by ultimate community of nature: deep calls to deep: the response is living and eternal.
CHAPTER XXIII
WAVES
The most familiar appeal of the Ocean is that of the wave which speeds over its surface or breaks upon its shores. Poets have found here an inexhaustible theme. Painters have here expended their utmost skill. Whether it is the tiny ripple that dies along the curving sands, or the merry, rustling, crested surf that hurries on to wanton in the rocky pools, or the storm billow that rushes wildly against an iron-bound coast to spurt aloft its sheets of spray or to hurl its threatening mass on the trembling strand—in each and every form the wave is a moving miracle. Through every change of contour and interplay of curves, its lines are ever of inimitable grace. Its gradations of colour, its translucent opalescence framed in gleaming greens and tender greys, wreathed with the radiance of the foam, are of inimitable charm. Its gamuts of sounds, the faint lisp of the wavelet on the pebbly beach, the rhythmic rise and fall of the plashing or plunging surf, the roar and scream of the breaker, and the boom of the billow, are of inimitable range. What marvel is it that even the commonplace of the sons of men yield themselves gladly to a spell they cannot analyse, content to linger, to gaze, and to ponder!
If the spell of the waves enthralls the ordinary mortal, how much more those whose aesthetic and spiritual senses are keen and disciplined? Coleridge, while listening to the tide, with eyes closed, but with mind alert, finds his thoughts wandering back to
"that blind bard who on the Chian strand
By those deep sounds possessed with inward light,
Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssee
Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea."
Swinburne, listening to the same music, exclaims: