there a handful of foam upon the surface of the deep. No cloud has
dimmed the splendour of a day which has filled the round heavens with
soft music and touched the sea with strange and changeful beauty. It
has been enough to wait and watch, to forget self, to escape the
limitations of personality, and to become part of the movement, which,
hour by hour, has passed through one marvellous change after another,
until now it seems to pause under the sleepless vigilance of the stars.
They look down from their immeasurable altitudes on the vast expanse of
which only a miniature hemisphere stretches before me. How wide and
fathomless seems the ocean, even from a single isolated point! What
infinite distances are only half veiled by the distant horizon line!
What islands and continents and undiscovered worlds lie beyond that
faint and ever receding circle where the sight pauses, while the
thought travels unimpeded on its pathless way? There lies the untamed
world which brooks no human control, and preserves the primeval
solitude of the epochs before men came; there are the elemental forces
mingling and commingling in eternal fellowships and rivalries. There
the winds sweep, and the storms marshal their shadows as on the first
day; there, too, the sunlight sleeps on the summer sea as it slept in
those forgotten summers before a sail had ever whitened the blue, or a
keel cut evanescent furrows in the trackless waste.

Every hour has brought its change to make this day memorable; hour by
hour the lights have transformed the waters and hung over them a sky
full of varied and changeful radiance. Across the line of the distant
horizon white sails have come and gone in broken and mysterious
procession, and the imagination has followed them far in their unknown
journeyings. As silently as they passed from sight, all human history
enacted in this vast province of nature's empire has vanished, and left
no trace of itself save here and there a bit of driftwood. There lies
the unconquered and forever inviolate kingdom of forces over which no
human skill will ever cast the net of conquest.

The sea speaks to the imagination as no other aspect of the natural
world does, because of its vastness, its immeasurable and overwhelming
power, its exclusion from human history, its free, buoyant, changeful
being. It stands for those strange and unfamiliar revelations with
which Nature sometimes breaks in upon our easy relation with her, and