And as for our own more immediate forefathers, the mystic spell of the ocean wave sank deep into their rugged souls. "When you so dance" (says Shakespeare to a maiden) "I wish you a wave o' the sea, that you might ever do nothing but that." The experiences of countless watchers of the wave went to the framing of that wish!
And, as has been richly proved by quotations from our modern poets, the mystic spell gains in potency as man's aesthetic powers are keener and more disciplined. The present-day nature-mystic needs no imaginary personifications to bring him into communion with the beauty, the mystery, of the ocean wave. He conceives of it as a manifestation of certain modes of being which are akin to himself and which speak to him in language too plain to be ignored or misinterpreted. Human knowledge has not yet advanced far enough to define more closely such modes of experience; but the fact of the experience remains.
CHAPTER XXIX
STILL WATERS
Tiefer Stille herrscht im Wasser,
Ohno Regung ruht das Meer,
Und bekümmert sieht der Schiffer
Glatte Flache rings umher.
Keine Luft von keiner Seite!
Todesstille fürchterlich!
In der ungeheuern Weite
Reget keine Welle sich.
Thus does Goethe, in this little poem of two verses, with a masterly ease that carries conviction, suggest to us the subtle power of a calm at sea. The mountain tarn, alone with the sky, has a charm that is all its own. The shining levels of the lake, in the lower hollows of the hills; the quiet reaches of a river where the stream seems to pause and gather strength for its onward course; even the still pool that hides in the meadows among the alders and willows: each of these has its own peculiar charm—a charm which is hard to analyse but almost universal in its range of appeal. But potent above them all is this Meeresstille, this calm at sea—when, as Bowring finely translates Goethe's second verse:
"Not a zephyr is in motion!
Silence fearful as the grave!
In the mighty waste of ocean
Sunk to rest is every wave."
Turner, in his "Liber Studiorum," attempted to depict a calm at sea. The picture is not one of his most successful efforts: but so great an artist could not fail to seize on the essential features of his subject. The sun is heralding his advent by flinging upward athwart the mists and cloudlets a stream of diffused light which fills the scene with a soft pervading glow. The surface of the water is glassy, not much more substantial than the haze which floats above it. But deep as is the calm, old ocean cannot quite forget his innate restlessness; he gently urges onward a succession of slow risings and fallings, with broad ripples to mark their boundaries, and to tell of spent billows and far-heaving tides. The movement of the waters is, as it were, subconsciously felt rather than perceived; or, if perceived, it is lost in the pervading sense of placid spaciousness. The boats and their occupants, so far from disturbing the sense of calm, are made to enhance it. And the unruffled surface of the water is rendered palpably impalpable by the magic of reflections.