y your
open palm on the mast, rather, and feel life pulsing beneath it, trembling
through and along every nerve of her. Are you converted? That life is
yours to control. Take the tiller, then, and for an hour be a god!
For indeed you shall be a god, and of the very earliest. The centuries
shall run out with the chain as you slip moorings--run out and drop from
you, plumb, and leave you free, winged! Or if you cannot forget in a
moment the times to which you were born, each wave shall turn back a page
as it rolls past to break on the shore towards which you revert no glance.
Even the romance of it shall fade with the murmur of that coast.

"Sails of silk and ropes of sendal,
Such as gleam in ancient lore,
And the singing of the sailor,
And the answer from the shore--"

These shall pass and leave you younger than romance--a child open-eyed and
curious, pleased to meet a sea-parrot or a rolling porpoise, or to watch
the gannets diving--

"As Noah saw them dive
O'er sunken Ararat."

Yes, and sunset shall bring you, a god, to the gates of a kingdom I must
pause to describe for you, though when you reach it you will forget my
description and imagine yourself its first discoverer. But that is a part
of its charm.

Walter Pater, reading the _Odyssey_, was brought up (as we say) 'with a
round turn' by a passage wherein Homer describes briefly and with accuracy
how some mariners came to harbour, took down sail, and stepped ashore.
It filled him with wonder that so simple an incident--nor to say ordinary
--could be made so poetical; and, having pondered it, he divided the
credit between the poet and his fortunate age--a time (said he) in which
one could hardly have spoken at all without ideal effect, or the sailors
pulled down their boat without making a picture 'in the great style'
against a sky charged with marvels.

You will discover, when you reach the river-mouth of which I am telling,
and are swept over the rolling bar into quiet water--you will discover
(and with ease, being a god) that Mr. Pater was entirely mistaken, and the
credit belongs neither to Homer nor to his fortunate age. For here are
woods with woodlanders, and fields with ploughmen, and beaches with
fishermen hauling nets; and all these men, as they go about their work,
contrive to make pictures 'in the great style' against a sky charged with
marvels, obviously without any assistance from Homer, and quite