e
framing of that wish!

And, as has been richly proved by quotations from our modern
poets, the mystic spell gains in potency as man's aesthetic
powers are keener and more disciplined. The present-day
nature-mystic needs no imaginary personifications to bring him
into communion with the beauty, the mystery, of the ocean
wave. He conceives of it as a manifestation of certain modes of
being which are akin to himself and which speak to him in
language too plain to be ignored or misinterpreted. Human
knowledge has not yet advanced far enough to define more
closely such modes of experience; but the fact of the experience
remains.

CHAPTER XXIX

STILL WATERS

Tiefer Stille herrscht im Wasser,
Ohno Regung ruht das Meer,
Und bekuemmert sieht der Schiffer
Glatte Flache rings umher.

Keine Luft von keiner Seite!
Todesstille fuerchterlich!
In der ungeheuern Weite
Reget keine Welle sich.

Thus does Goethe, in this little poem of two verses, with a
masterly ease that carries conviction, suggest to us the subtle
power of a calm at sea. The mountain tarn, alone with the sky,
has a charm that is all its own. The shining levels of the lake, in
the lower hollows of the hills; the quiet reaches of a river where
the stream seems to pause and gather strength for its onward
course; even the still pool that hides in the meadows among the
alders and willows: each of these has its own peculiar charm--a
charm which is hard to analyse but almost universal in its range
of appeal. But potent above them all is this Meeresstille, this
calm at sea--when, as Bowring finely translates Goethe's second
verse:

"Not a zephyr is in motion!
Silence fearful as the grave!
In the mighty waste of ocean
Sunk to rest is every wave."

Turner, in his "Liber Studiorum," attempted to depict a calm at
sea. The picture is not one of his most successful efforts: but so
great an artist could not fail to seize on the essential features of
his subject. The sun is heralding his advent by flinging upward
athwart the mists and cloudlets a stream of diffused light which
fills the scene with a soft pervading glow. The surface of the
water is glassy, not much more substantial than the haze which
floats above it. But deep as is the calm, old ocean cannot quite
forget his innate restlessness; he gently urges onward a
succession of slow risings and fallings, with broad ripples to
mark their boundaries, and to t