the mood
of Mr Kipling and the Hebrew author is essentially the same.

It is, nevertheless, man's constant dream that he will yet be able to
defeat these terrors of the sea. He sees himself with elation as the
conqueror of storms, and makes his plans to build a ship that no
accident can sink either in a wild sea or a calm. Before the _Titanic_
went down many people thought that the great discovery had been made.
The _Titanic_ went forth like a boast, and perished from one of the
few accidents her builders had not provided against, like a victim of
Nemesis in a Greek story. After that, we ceased to believe in the
unsinkable ship; but we thought at least that, if only ships were
furnished with enough boats to hold everyone on board, no ship would
ever again sink on a calm night carrying over a thousand human beings
to the bottom. Yet the _Empress of Ireland_ had apparently boats
enough to save every passenger, and now she has gone down with over a
thousand dead in shallow water at the mouth of a river which, the
_Times_ insists, is at least as safe for navigation as the English
Channel, and much safer than the Thames. It is as though the great
machines we have invented were not machines of safety, but machines of
destruction. They have us in their grip as we thought we had the sea
in ours. They do but betray us, indeed, in a new manner into an
ancient snare--the snare of a power that, like Leviathan,

Esteemeth iron as straw,
And brass as rotten wood.

We must, no doubt, go on dreaming that we shall master the sea, and
that we shall do it with machines perfectly under our control. But, if
we are wise, we shall dream humbly and put off boasting until we are
dead and quite sure that the triumph has been ours. It would be
inhuman, I admit, never to feel a thrill of satisfaction at man's
plodding success in breaking the sea and the air to his uses, in the
discovery of fire, in converting the lightning into an illumination
for nurseries. But we still perish by fire and flood, by wind and
lightning. We use them, but it is at our peril. It is as though we
were favoured strangers in the elements, but assuredly we are not
conquerors. Mr Wells in _The World Set Free_ makes one of his
characters in the pride of human invention shake his fist at the sun
and cry out, "I'll have you yet." It would have seemed to the Greeks
blasphemy, and it still seems folly for man, a hair-pin of flesh
half-hidden in trousers, to talk so. The