profound inattention to man is part of its power
over his imagination; for although it is so absorbed and busy, and has
regard for sun and stars and a melancholy frowning concentration upon the
foot of cliffs, it is never face to face with man: he can never come
within the focus of its great glancing vision. It is somewhere beyond
time and space that the mighty perspective of those focal rays comes to
its point; and they are so wide and eternal in their sweep that we should
find their end, could we but trace them, in a condition far different
from that in which our finite views and ethics have place. In the man
who lives much on the sea we always find, if he be articulate, something
of the dreamer and the mystic; that very condition of mind, indeed, which
we have traced in Columbus, which sometimes led him to such heights, and
sometimes brought him to such variance with the human code.

A face that will not look upon you can never give up its secret to you;
and the face of the sea is like the face of a picture or a statue round
which you may circle, looking at it from this point and from that, but
whose regard is fixed on something beyond and invisible to you; or it is
like the face of a person well known to you in life, a face which you
often see in various surroundings, from different angles, now
unconscious, now in animated and smiling intercourse with some one else,
but which never turns upon you the light of friendly knowledge and
recognition; in a word, it is unconscious of you, like all elemental
things. In the legend of the Creation it is written that when God saw
the gathering together of the waters which he called the Seas, he saw
that it was good; and he perhaps had the right to say so. But the man
who uses the sea and whose life's pathway is laid on its unstable surface
can hardly sum up his impressions of it so simply as to say that it is
good. It is indeed to him neither good nor bad; it is utterly beyond and
outside all he knows or invents of good and bad, and can never have any
concern with his good or his bad. It remains the pathway and territory
of powers and mysteries, thoughts and energies on a gigantic and
elemental scale; and that is why the mind of man can never grapple with
the unconsciousness of the sea or his eye meet its eye. Yet it is the
mariner's chief associate, whether as adversary or as ally; his attitude
to things outside himself is beyond all doubt influenced by his attitude
tow