And who of us will forget that great English poet of to-day, that supreme singer of—
“Sky, and shore, and cloud, and waste, and sea,”
who has written so often and so magically of the spell of the sea and of the elation of those who commit themselves to the sway and rhythm of its moving waters:—
“The grey sky gleams and the grey seas glimmer,
Pale and sweet as a dream’s delight,
As a dream’s where darkness and light seem dimmer,
Touched by dawn or subdued by night.
The dark wind, stern and sublime and sad,
Swings the rollers to westward, clad
With lustrous shadow that lures the swimmer,
Lures and lulls him with dreams of light.
“Light, and sleep, and delight, and wonder,
Change, and rest, and a charm of cloud,
Fill the world of the skies whereunder
Heaves and quivers and pants aloud
All the world of the waters, hoary
Now, but clothed with its own live glory,
That mates the lightning and mocks the thunder
With light more living and word more proud.
“A dream, and more than a dream, and dimmer
At once and brighter than dreams that flee,
The moment’s joy of the seaward swimmer
Abides, remembered as truth may be.
Not all the joy and not all the glory
Must fade as leaves when the woods wax hoary;
For there the downs and the sea-banks glimmer,
And here to south of them swells the sea.”
What swimmer too, who loves this poet, but will recall the marvellous sea-shine line in ‘Thalassius’:
“Dense water-walls and clear dusk waterways ...
The deep divine dark dayshine of the sea——”
It is this exquisite miracle of transparency which gives the last secret of beauty to water. All else that we look upon is opaque: the mountain in its sundown purple or noon-azure, the meadows and fields, the gathered greenness of woods, the loveliness of massed flowers, the myriad wonder of the universal grass, even the clouds that trail their shadows upon the hills or soar so high into frozen deeps of azure that they pass shadowless like phantoms or the creatures of dreams—the beauty of all these is opaque. But the beauty of water is that it is transparent. Think if the grass, if the leaves of the tree, if the rose and the iris and the pale horns of the honeysuckle, if the great mountains built of grey steeps of granite and massed purple of shadow were thus luminous, thus transparent! Think if they, too, as the sea, could reflect the passage of saffron-sailed and rose-flusht argosies of cloud, or mirror as in the calms of ocean the multitudinous undulation of the blue sky! This divine translucency is but a part of the Sea-Spell, which holds us from childhood to old age in wonder and delight, but that part is its secret joy, its incommunicable charm.