a, recalled him from such wanderings to

"charm him from his own soul's separate sense
With infinite and invasive influence,
That made strength sweet in him and sweetness strong,
Being now no more a singer, but a song."

And akin to this exhilarating effect on a poet's sensibility is that
which it has exercised on the large scale in moulding the
characters and fortunes of seafaring nations. Longfellow had a
firm grip of this historical fact:

"Wouldst thou (so the helmsman answered)
Learn the secret of the sea?
Only those who brave its dangers
Comprehend its mystery."

Allan Cunningham's sea songs furnish the classical expression
of the spirit in its modern guise as embodied in the British
sailor--the defender of the isle that is "compassed by the
inviolate sea":

"The sea! the sea! the open sea!
The ever fresh, the ever free."

Byron may be criticised as too consciously "posing" in his
well-known apostrophe to the ocean; nevertheless it contains a
tang of the Viking spirit:

"And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy
Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Borne like thy bubbles onward: from a boy
I wantoned with thy breakers."

What is the core of this Viking buoyancy and exhilaration?
Surely a sense of freedom, inspired by a life on the ocean, and
fostered by the very hardships and dangers which that life
entails.

Thus cumulative is the evidence that the present, for all its
materialism, inherits the essence of the ancient mysticism; or
rather, it is open to the same impulses and intuitions, however
changed and changing the forms they may assume. On the one
hand, the infinite complexity of man's developing soul-life; on
the other, the limitless range of the moods and aspects of the
ocean: the two are spiritually linked by ultimate community of
nature: deep calls to deep: the response is living and eternal.

CHAPTER XXIII

WAVES

The most familiar appeal of the Ocean is that of the wave which
speeds over its surface or breaks upon its shores. Poets have
found here an inexhaustible theme. Painters have here expended
their utmost skill. Whether it is the tiny ripple that dies along
the curving sands, or the merry, rustling, crested surf that
hurries on to wanton in the rocky pools, or the storm billow that
rushes wildly against an iron-bound coast to spurt aloft its
sheets of spray or to hurl its threatening mass on the trembling
s