So barren sands imbibe the shower, The man I trust, if shy to me, No subterfuge or pleading XL. NO MORE SEA. REVELATION xxi. I HEN the first heaven and the first earth were passed WE away from the vision of the seer of Patmos, and a new heaven and a new earth filled his gaze, "there was no more sea. Like so many other passages in his book of revelation, this one is of disputed meaning. We islanders are apt to grudge the literal acceptation of the words, and to fancy that a cosmos without a sea would almost be chaos come again. Expositors incline to the belief that what is implied is the removal of a barrier to free intercourse, and that the sea as such a barrier, oceanus dissociabilis,* can well be spared from the new creation. But why should the waters of the great deep be dried off on that account alone? Water seems to remain as a means of separation within the New Jerusalem itself, since we read of the tree of life" on either side of the river," that pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, pro * A scholarly critic protests against what he calls the "miserable fallacy of Horace about the oceanus dissociabilis," and contends that so far from an island-life implying the being cut off from the rest of the world, throughout the history of Europe the sea has been the great connecter of nations. Till railways were invented, he argues, water carriage was much the easiest way of travelling for all purposes; and so far from being cut off from other nations by our insular position, we islanders had probably more intercourse with foreigners than had any other nation in Europe. ceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. Seas may be bridged as well as rivers; it is a question of degree— practically speaking, as well as conjecturally, or speculatively. At any rate one is loth to accept an interpretation which would involve the extinction of an object so instinct with associations of grandeur, sublimity, and elevating awe, as the mighty ocean. Be it fully conceded, nevertheless, that whole kindreds, peoples, and tongues, especially in the East, have held the sea in pronounced and persistent aversion,-hating it as intensely as they feared it, and so hating because they so feared it. Adam Smith opens a pregnant paragraph of his Wealth of Nations with the remark, "The ancient Egyptians had a superstitious aversion to the sea." To the Persians it is as repellant as to the Arabs it is attractive. To the Romans, says Gibbon, in his first chapter, the ocean remained an object of terror rather than of curiosity; they "tried to disguise, by the pretence of religious awe, their ignorance and terror."* Graphically Mr. Lothrop Motley describes the dismay of the Spaniards before Leyden, in 1574, when the great dyke was pierced brave as they were on land, the Spaniards were not sailors," and it was natural that they should be amazed and confounded at what they saw. "Nothing is more appalling to the imagination than the rising ocean tide, when man feels himself within its power; and here were the waters, hourly deepening and closing round them, devouring the earth beneath their feet,”-not to speak of the flotilla that rode on those waves, bent equally on their destruction. Two at least 66 of France's foremost prose poets for so we may designate both Michelet and Victor Hugo (not however forgetting the right of the latter to be accounted one of her foremost poets absolute and unconditioned)-have given forcible expression to the sense of shuddering awe which the expanse of ocean engenders in some imaginative minds. Victor Hugo dilates upon the mystery of the dread, laborious ocean," upon the vacillation of the waves, the perseverance of the foam, the 66 * See Tacitus, Germania, c. 34. wearing-down of rocks. Of these latter he is eloquent upon the kind called, in the old sea-dialect, Isolés: rocks in midocean, where the sea is alone, and works her own will, undisturbed by token of terrestrial life. "Man is a terror to the sea; she is shy of his approach, and hides from him her deeds. But she is bolder among the lone sea rocks. The everlasting soliloquy of the waves is not troubled there." She has her splendid and monstrous vegetation, composed of floating plants which bite, and of monsters which take root; and she hides away all this magnificence in the twilight of her deeps. It is here she developes at liberty her mysterious side, inaccessible to man; here keeps all strange secretions of life, and here assembles her unknown wonders. "Moi aussi," writes Michelet, in presence of a storm, "je regardais insatiablement cette mer, je la regardais avec haine. N'étant pas en danger réel, je n'en avais que davantage l'ennui et la désolation. Elle était laide; d'affreuse mine. Rien ne rappelait les vains tableaux des poëtes. Seulement, par un contraste étrange, moins je me sentais bien vivant, plus, elle, elle avait l'air de vivre. Toutes ces vagues électrisées par un si furieux mouvement avaient pris une animation, et comme une âme fantastique, dans la fureur générale chacune avait sa fureur. . . Elles me faisaient l'effet d'un épouvantable mob, d'une horrible populace, non d'hommes, mais de chiens aboyants, un million, un milliard de dogues acharnés, ou plutôt fous. Que dis-je ? des chiens, des dogues? ce n'était pas cela encore, c'étaient des apparitions exécrables et innommées, des bêtes sans yeux ni oreilles, n'ayant que des gueules écumantes. Monstres, que voulez-vous donc ! n'êtes-vous pas soûls des naufrages que j'apprends de tous côtés? Que demandez-vous? Ta mort et la mort universelle, la suppression de la terre et le retour au chaos."" If this be indeed the demand of the sea,- -if the voice of the waves is instant for the suppression of dry land and for a return to chaos,-light is indeed thrown, be it lurid or otherwise, on the saving import of that saving clause in the Apocalypse, that there shall, in the new dispensation, be no more sea. That line of Mr. Matthew Arnold's, "The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea," has been pronounced by a discerning and practised critic, inexhaustible in beauty and force,-shadowing out, as it does, without any false emphasis or prolix dwelling on the matter, the plunging deep-sea lead and the eerie cry of "no soundings," and recalling that saltness of the sea which takes from water every refreshing association, every quality that helps to slake thirst or supply sap,—and then concentrating all these dividing attributes, which strike a sort of lonely terror into the soul, into the one word "estranging." Mrs. Browning calls the sea "that blue end of the world, That fair scroll-finis of a wicked book." To those who have been familiar with it all their lives, it might almost seem, Archdeacon Hare said, as though their minds would be " poor shrunken things," without its air to brace and expand them ;"* if for instance they had never seen the ȧvýpiμov yéλaoua of the waves, nor knew how changeful the sea is, and yet how constant and changeless amid all the changes of the seasons, nor how powerful she is, whom Winter with all his chains can no more bind than Xerxes could, how powerful to destroy in her fury, how powerful to bless in her calmness, nor had ever learnt the lesson of obedience and of order from her, the lesson of ceaseless activity, and of deep unfathomable rest; if they had no sublunary teacher but the mute, motionless earth, and had been deprived of an everfaithful mirror of heaven. Julius Hare, too, equally with Mr. Freeman, rejects the Horatian epithet dissociabilis, and maintains that however much the Sea may appear to be the great separater of nations, the impassable barrier to all intercourse, * Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes tells us of Myrtle and her long voyage as a child, that, in the course of it, the strange mystery of the ocean was wrought into her consciousness so deeply, that it seemed to belong to her being the waves rocked her, as if the sea had been her mother; and, looking over the vessel's side from the arms that held her with tender care, she used to watch the play of the waters, until the rhythm of their movement became a part of her, almost as much as her own pulse and breath. yet in fact it is the grand medium of communication, the chief uniter of mankind, the only means by which the opposite ends of the earth can hold converse as though they were neighbours. "Thus in divers ways the Tóvtos åtpúyetos has become even more productive than if fields of corn were waving all over it." That it has been an essential condition in the civilizing of nations, all history shows. Perhaps the Germans in our days are the first people who have reached any high degree of culture, who have become eminent in poetry and in thought, -without its immediate aid. Yet Germany has been called "she of the Danube and the Northern Sea;" and might still more justly be called "she of the Rhine."* With the benison, "God be with thee, gladsome Ocean," Coleridge opens the first stanza of one of his lyrics. With Wordsworth we watch "the gentleness of heaven brood o'er the Sea; "Listen! the mighty Being is awake, It is in the sonnet next succeeding this one, that the fine line occurs which tells of the poet having "Of the old Sea some reverential fear." And in a like spirit he speaks, in the Prelude, of "the grandeur which invests The mariner, who sails the roaring sea Through storm and darkness." An American writer calls the sound of the soft, eternal pulsations of the distant sea, the "mournfullest, most mysterious, of all the harpings of Nature," and goes on to speak with a kind of shuddering awe of the "treacherous, soft, dreadful, inexplicable sea." Dr. Howard Russell, if we may take Dr. Brady for his spokesman, refers to an early voyage from which were derived impressions of the force of the sea, of its cruelty, its * The Greek was not shut in by his mountains. "The sea enlarged the range and scope of his thoughts, which the mountains might have hemmed in." To him, as to us English, it was an inexhaustible mine of intellectual riches. "Nor is it without a prophetic symbolicalness that the sea fills so important a part in both the Homeric poems."-Guesses at Truth, 3rd edit., p. 93; cf. pp. 102 sq. |