This picture is the largest of the series. Not only the water but the sky in this painting is superb, with the faint shimmer of the sunlight breaking through the clouds. The color is that peculiar green gray, which is the most fascinating hue known to the sea, and only present when the sky is overcast. The water and the motion of the waves are grand beyond comparison—an actual living, moving, foaming mass and as seen in mid-ocean. The conception of this painting as introductory to the whole series is most poetic. It suggests the deep, dark, dreaded, unknown waste of waters which was shrouded in mystery for thousands of years until a few daring seamen, first the Norsemen, and then Columbus with his little band, undertook the perilous task of lifting the veil. Its unexplored expanse naturally and logically preceded every voyage of discovery and is the keynote of all the marvellous achievements which subsequently constituted it the link between America and the Eastern world. It also typifies the greatest of all republics, which was to spring up beyond its westernmost limits, for nothing is so free, unfettered and seemingly conscious of its own strength and possibilities as the mighty ocean.
This painting may be likened to the opening stanzas of an epic poem, in which the theme of the story is foreshadowed, and no grander epic was ever written than is depicted in these thirteen mighty paintings, of all those qualities of heroism and adventure which have ever been thought worthy of commemoration in song or story.
How well the famous stanzas of Lord Byron, in Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage, illustrate the thoughts suggested by this "Ocean" of Edward Moran:
"Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin—his control
Stops with the shore;—upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,
When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown.
* * * * * * * * *
"Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form
Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,
Calm or convulsed—in breeze, or gale, or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime
Dark-heaving;—boundless, endless and sublime—
The image of Eternity—the throne
Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime
The monsters of the deep are made; each zone
Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone."