human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought;
Hearing it by this distant northern sea."

And the thought! "The melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of
the Sea of Faith, retreating down the "naked shingles of the
world!"

But if the pessimistic mood may thus find support in watching
the waves of the sea, so no less surely can the hopeful and
joyous mood be evolved and stimulated by the same influence.
Before Sophocles came AEschylus. The greatest hero of this
earlier poet was Prometheus, the friend of man, who, tortured
but unshaken, looked out from his Caucasian rock on the
presentments of primeval nature. How sublime his appeal!

"Ether of heaven, and Winds untired of wing,
Rivers whose fountains fail not, and thou Sea
Laughing in waves innumerable!"

To him the winds and waves brought a message of untiring,
indomitable energy--the movement, the gleam, inspired fresh
life and hope. The ideas immanent in the ocean wave are as
varied as the human experiences to which they are akin.

Or take another group of these ideas immanent in the
phenomena of the wave--the group which rouse and nurture the
aesthetic side of man's nature. Very significant in this regard is
the fact that not for the Greeks alone, but also for the Hindus
and the Teutons, the goddesses of beauty were wave-born.
When Aphrodite walked the earth, flowers sprang up beneath
her feet; but her birthplace was the crest of a laughing wave. So
Kama, the Hindu Cupid, and the Apsaras, lovely nymphs, rose
from the wind-stirred surface of the sea, drawn upward in
streaming mists by the ardent sun. So, too, the Teutonic Freyja
took shape in the sea-born cloudlets of the upper air.

The loveliness of the wave, dancing, tossing, or breaking must
have entered, from earliest days, deeply into the heart and
imagination of man, and have profoundly influenced his
mythology, his art, and his poetry. We trace this influence in
olden days by the myths of Poseidon with his seahorses and the
bands of Tritons, Nereids, and Oceanides--each and all giving
substance to vague intuitions and subconscious perceptions of
the physical beauty of the ocean.

And as for our own more immediate forefathers, the mystic
spell of the ocean wave sank deep into their rugged souls.
"When you so dance" (says Shakespeare to a maiden) "I wish
you a wave o' the sea, that you might ever do nothing but that."
The experiences of countless watchers of the wave went to th