XII. INFLUENCE. MRS. S. T. BOLTON. THE smallest bark on Life's tumultuous ocean The lightest wave of influence, set in motion, LESSON CIX. POLY PHE MUS, a fabulous monster, of gigantic size; one of the Cyclops; who had but one eye, and that in the middle of the forehead. The allusion in the text is to his efforts at revenge, after having been blinded by Ulysses. 2 SPHINX, a monster usually represented as having the body of a lion, with a human countenance. THAT THE SEA. FROM THE FRENCH OF MICHELET. ПHAT immense mass of water which we call the sea, dark and inscrutable in its great depths, ever and always impresses the human mind with a vague and resistless awe. With what a soothing, hallowed, and hallowing melancholy do we, evening after evening, behold the sun, that great world's joy, that brilliant, life-quickening, and life-giving sun of all that live, fade, sink, die,—though so surely to rise and live again! Ah! as that glorious sun departs, how tenderly do we think of the human loves that have died from us,-of the hour when we, also, shall thus depart from human ken, lost, for the time, to this world, to shine more gloriously in that other world, now dark, distant, unknown, but certain! 2. Descend to even a slight depth in the sea, and the beauty and brilliancy of the upper light are lost. You enter into a persistent twilight, and misty, half-lurid haze; a little lower, and even that sinister and hideous twilight is lost, and all around you is night, showing nothing, but suggesting every thing that darkness can suggest. Above, below, all around, darkness, utter darkness, save when, from time to time, the swift and gracefully terrible motion of some passing monster of the deep makes "darkness visible" for a brief moment; and then that passing gleam leaves you in darkness more dense, more utter, more terrible, than ever. 3. The waters of the sea afford no encouragement by their transparency. Opaque, heavy, mighty, merciless, the sea is a liquid Polyphemus,' a blind giant that cares not, reasons not, feels not, but hits a terribly hard blow. Trust yourself upon that vast and ever-heaving bosom, bold swimmer, and marvelously will you be upheld; the mighty thing that upholds you, dominates you too; you are a mere weak child, upheld indeed, for the instant, by a giant hand. In another moment, that giant hand may smite you with a giant's fatal force. 4. Childish as we may regard those terrors, they really are much the same as the emotions which we may any day see evinced by an inland novice, who, for the first time, looks upon the sea. And not merely man, but all animals, experience the same surprise, the same shock, when suddenly brought face to face with the mighty water-world. Even at ebb-tide, when the water so gently and so lovingly caresses, as it leaves, that shore to which it shall so boisterously return, your horse quite evidently likes it not: he shudders, balks, snorts, and very often bolts from it at the very top of his speed. Your dog recoils, howls, and never concludes a real peace with the element which to him seems positively hostile. 5. Long before we are face to face with the sea, we can hear and imagine that grand and terrible entity. At first, we hear only a dull, uniform, and distant moaning, which grows louder and louder still, until its majestic roar silences, or covers, all minor sounds. Very soon we perceive that that roar is not monotonous, but has its alternating notes, -its full, rich, mellow tenor, and its round, deep, majestic bass. The pendulum of the clock oscillates less regularly than that alternating moan and roar of the Ocean in her grand unrest. In "what those wild waves are saying," we feel, or fancy we feel, the thrilling intonations of life. 6. And how many other voices hath the mighty Sea, I know not, and will not anticipate. I will not speak of those terrible concerts in which, haply, ere long, she will take the principal part; cf her duets with the rocks; of the basses, those muttered thunders which she utters in the deep caverns of the rocky shore; or those strange, wild, weird, shrieking tones, in which we seem to recognize the melancholy cry of "Help! spare! save!" of some fearfully imperiled humanity. No: let us, for the present, contemplate her in her calmer moods, when she is strong, indeed, but not violent. 7. We need not be at all surprised if childhood and ignorance are astounded when they first find themselves face to face with that vast and mysterious sphinx2 of the great Master's sculpture, the ocean. Why, in fact, should we be astonished by their gaze of mingled awe, admiration, and bewilderment, when we ourselves, despite our early culture and life-long experience, see so much in the great riddle of that vast sphinx, which we can not even hope to explain? 8. What is the real extent of the ocean? That it is greater than that of the earth, is about as much as, conscientiously, we can at all positively affirm. On the entire surface of the globe, water is the generality, land the exception. But what is their relative proportion? That water covers four-fifths of the globe is probable; yet it is difficult, not to say impossible, to answer the question precisely. 9. The real depth of the sea is still less known to us than its extent. We are only at the mere commencement of our early, few, and imperfect soundings. That those mighty depths contain a great and diversified world of life, love, war, and reproduction of all sorts and sizes, we may with confidence affirm; but we have only and barely touched upon the threshold of that world. If we need the ocean, the ocean in no wise needs us. Nature, fresh from the hand of Deity, scorns the too prying gaze, and the too shallow judgment of finite but presumptuous man. 10. Shifting and capricious as the ocean appears, it suffers, in reality, no change; on the contrary, it is a perfect model of regularity. The really constantly changing creature is man! Fragile and fleeting as man is, he has, indeed, good reason for reflection and humility, when he finds himself in presence of the great unchanging and unchangeable powers of Nature, which are ever just, grand, and glorious, as his hope, his belief, and certainty of a spiritual immortality. Despite that delightful hope, that confident belief, that sustaining certainty, man yet is necessarily and terribly saddened by the strange suddenness with which he hourly sees the thread of his life forever broken. 11. Whenever we approach the Sea, she seems to murmur from her dark, inscrutable depths, unchangeable as His will who made it," Mortal, to-morrow you shall pass away; but I, I am, and ever shall be, unchanged, unchangeable, mighty, and mysterious! The earth will not only receive your bones, but will soon convert them into kindred earth; but I, ever and always, shall remain, the same majestic entity, the great perfectly-balanced Life, daily harmonizing myself with the harmonious and majestic life of the bright worlds that shine above and around you!" 12. Look upon the Ocean where and when you may, you everywhere and always find her the same grand and terrible teacher of that hardest of all the lessons man has to learn, MAN'S INSIGNIFICANCE! Take your stand upon some bold headland, from which, with earnest and welltrained eye, you can sweep the entire horizon, or wander, with shortened ken, on the sandy desert,-go whithersoever you will, where old Ocean shall lash the shore, and everywhere and always you shall find her the same, – MIGHTY AND TERRIBLE! LESSON CX. A WILD NIGHT AT SEA. CHARLES DICKENS. N, on, on, over the countless miles of angry space, roll the long heaving billows. Mountains and caves are here, and yet are not; for what is now the one is now the other; then all is but a boiling heap of rushing water. |