practical, too utterly common-sensical age to conceive a poor woman
with nothing on earth left to live for, being lured down to the Shades
by a creature of the water, or a man who longs for death seeing a
beautiful daughter of a river-god beckoning to him to come where he
will find peace everlasting.

Yet ever we war with the sea. All of us know her seductive charm, but
all of us fear her. The boundary line between our fear of the fierce,
remorseless, ever-seeking, cruel waves that lap up life swiftly as a
thirsty beast laps water, and the old belief in cruel sea-creatures
that sought constantly for the human things that were to be their
prey, is a very narrow one. And once we have seen the sea in a rage,
flinging herself in terrible anger against the poor, frail toy that
the hands of men have made and that was intended to rule and to resist
her, foaming and frothing over the decks of the thing that carries
human lives, we can understand much of the old pagan belief. If one
has watched a river in spate, red as with blood, rushing triumphantly
over all resistance, smashing down the trees that baulk it, sweeping
away each poor, helpless thing, brute or human, that it encounters,
dealing out ruin and death, and proceeding superbly on to carry its
trophies of disaster to the bosom of the Ocean Mother, very easy is it
to see from whence came those old tales of cruelty, of irresistible
strength, of desire.

Many are the tales of sea-maidens who have stolen men's lives from
them and sent their bodies to move up and down amidst the wrack, like
broken toys with which a child has grown tired of playing and cast
away in weariness. In an eighth-century chronicle concerning St.
Fechin, we read of evil powers whose rage is "seen in that watery fury
and their hellish hate and turbulence in the beating of the sea
against the rocks." "The bitter gifts of our lord Poseidon" is the
name given to them by one of the earliest poets of Greece[7] and a
poet of our own time--poet of the sea, of running water, and of lonely
places--quotes from the saying of a fisherman of the isle of Ulva
words that show why simple minds have so many times materialised the
restless, devouring element into the form of a woman who is very
beautiful, but whose tender mercies are very cruel. "She is like a
woman of the old tales whose beauty is dreadful," said Seumas, the
islander, "and who breaks your heart at last whether she smiles or
frowns. But she doesn't c