angers, strains of watching and listening
for distant and unlocalized signals. The listless movements of the ship
and her warning calls soon tell upon the nerves of the passengers; and
that special, expectant tacit anxiety and nervousness, always associated
with this experience, make a fog the dreaded terror of the sea (all the
more terrifying because of its very silence and gentleness) for the
expert seafarer no less than the ignorant landsman.

"Nevertheless, a fog at sea can be a source of intense relish and
enjoyment. Abstract from the experience of the sea-fog, for the moment,
its danger and practical unpleasantness; ... direct the attention to the
features 'objectively' constituting the phenomena--the veil surrounding
you with an opaqueness as of transparent milk, blurring the outlines of
things and distorting their shapes into weird grotesqueness; observe the
carrying power of the air, producing the impression as if you could
touch some far-off siren by merely putting out your hand and letting it
lose itself behind that white wall; note the curious creamy smoothness
of the water, hypercritically denying as it were, any suggestion of
danger; and, above all, the strange solitude and remoteness from the
world, as it can be found only on the highest mountain tops; and the
experience may acquire, in its uncanny mingling of repose and terror, a
flavour of such concentrated poignancy and delight as to contrast
sharply with the blind and distempered anxiety of its other aspects.
This contrast, often emerging with startling suddenness, is like the
momentary switching on of some new current, or the passing ray of a
brighter light, illuminating the outlook upon perhaps the most ordinary
and familiar objects--an impression which we experience sometimes in
instants of direst extremity, when our practical interest snaps like a
wire from sheer over-tension, and we watch the consummation of some
impending catastrophe with the marvelling unconcern of a mere
spectator."

* * * * *

It has often been noted that two, and two only, of our senses are the
channels of art and give us artistic material. These two senses are
sight and hearing. Touch and its special modifications, taste and smell,
do not go to the making of art. Decadent French novelists, such as
Huysmann, make their heroes revel in perfume-symphonies, but we feel
that the sentiment described is morbid and unreal, and we feel rightly.
Some