brings back on the instant that sense of remoteness which one feels
when in intimate fellowship a friend suddenly lifts the curtain from
some great experience hitherto unsuspected. In the vast sweep of life
through Nature there must always be aspects of awful strangeness; great
realms of mystery will remain unexplored, and almost inaccessible to
human thought; days will dawn at intervals in which those who love most
and are nearest Nature will feel an impenetrable cloud over all things,
and be suddenly smitten with a sense of weakness; the greatest of all
her interpreters are but children in knowledge of her mighty activities
and forces. On the sea this sense of remoteness and strangeness comes
oftener than in the presence of any other natural form; even the
mountains make sheltered places for our thought at their feet, or along
their precipitous ledges; but the sea makes no concessions to our human
weakness, and leaves the message which it intones with the voice of
tempest and the roar of surge without an interpreter. Men have come to
it in all ages, full of a passionate desire to catch its meaning and
enter into its secret, but the thought of the boldest of them has only
skirted its shores, and the vast sweep of untamed waters remains as on
the first day. Homer has given us the song of the landlocked sea, but
where has the ocean found a human voice that is not lost and forgotten
when it speaks to us in its own penetrating tones? The mountains stand
revealed in more than one interpretation, touched by their own
sublimity, but the sea remains silent in human speech, because no voice
will ever be strong enough to match its awful monody.

It is because the sea preserves its secret that it sways our
imagination so royally, and holds us by an influence which never
loosens its grasp. Again and again we return to it, spent and worn,
and it refills the cup of vitality; there is life enough and to spare
in its invisible and inexhaustible chambers to reclothe the continents
with verdure, and recreate the shattered strength of man. Facing its
unbroken solitudes the limitations of habit and thought become less
obvious; we escape the monotony of a routine, which blurs the senses
and makes the spirit less sensitive to the universe about it. Life
becomes free and plastic once more; a deep consciousness of its
inexhaustibleness comes over us and recreates hope, vigour, and
imagination. Under the little bridges of habit and th