"Yea, surely the sea like a harper
Laid his hand on the shore like a lyre."
Sometimes the emphasis is on the sympathy with the striving forces manifested in the ceaseless activity of the ocean as it
"beats against the stern dumb shore
The stormy passion of its mighty heart."
Sometimes the emphasis is on the subjective mood which that activity arouses:
"Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O sea.
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me,"
Sometimes the two are indissolubly blended as in the song, "Am Meer," so exquisitely set to music by Schubert—where the rhythmic echoes of the heaving tide accompany the surging emotions of a troubled heart.
The direct impression made by the objective phenomena of the play of waves finds abundant expression in the whole range of literature—not the least forcefully in Tennyson. How fine his painting of the wave on the open sea.
"As a wild wave in the wide North-Sea
Green glimmering towards the summit, bears, with all
Its stormy crests that smoke against the skies,
Down on a bark, and overbears the bark,
And him that helms it."
How perfect also the description of a wave breaking on a level, sandy beach:
"The crest of some slow-arching wave,
Heard in dead night along that table-shore,
Drops flat, and after the great waters break
Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves,
Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud,
From less and less to nothing."