bubbling, and opaque.
Moreover, the strong lines of life are suggested; the arches of the
rushing waves have all the rigid energy of green stalks, as if the whole
sea were one great green plant with one immense white flower rooted in
the abyss.

Now, a large number of delicate and superior persons would refuse to see
the force in that kitchen garden comparison, because it is not connected
with any of the ordinary maritime sentiments as stated in books and
songs. The aesthetic amateur would say that he knew what large and
philosophical thoughts he ought to have by the boundless deep. He would
say that he was not a greengrocer who would think first of greens. To
which I should reply, like Hamlet, apropos of a parallel profession, "I
would you were so honest a man." The mention of "Hamlet" reminds me, by
the way, that besides the girl who had never seen the sea, I knew a girl
who had never seen a stage-play. She was taken to "Hamlet," and she said
it was very sad. There is another case of going to the primordial point
which is overlaid by learning and secondary impressions. We are so used
to thinking of "Hamlet" as a problem that we sometimes quite forget that
it is a tragedy, just as we are so used to thinking of the sea as vast
and vague, that we scarcely notice when it is white and green.

But there is another quarrel involved in which the young gentleman
of culture comes into violent collision with the young lady of the
cauliflowers. The first essential of the merely bookish view of the sea
is that it is boundless, and gives a sentiment of infinity. Now it is
quite certain, I think, that the cauliflower simile was partly created
by exactly the opposite impression, the impression of boundary and of
barrier. The girl thought of it as a field of vegetables, even as a yard
of vegetables. The girl was right. The ocean only suggests infinity when
you cannot see it; a sea mist may seem endless, but not a sea. So far
from being vague and vanishing, the sea is the one hard straight line in
Nature. It is the one plain limit; the only thing that God has made that
really looks like a wall. Compared to the sea, not only sun and cloud
are chaotic and doubtful, but solid mountains and standing forests may
be said to melt and fade and flee in the presence of that lonely iron
line. The old naval phrase, that the seas are England's bulwarks, is not
a frigid and artificial metaphor; it came into the head of some genuine
sea-dog, when h