42 UNDER THE TREES. 



winds sweep, and the storms marshal their shadows 

 as on the first day ; there, too, the sunlight sleeps 

 on the summer sea as it slept in those forgotten 

 summers before a sail had ever whitened the blue, 

 or a keel cut evanescent furrows in the trackless 

 waste. 



Every hour has brought its change to make this 

 day memorable ; hour by hour the lights have 

 transformed the waters and hung over them a sky 

 full of varied and changeful radiance. Across the 

 line of the distant horizon white sails have come 

 and gone in broken and mysterious procession, and 

 the imagination has followed them far in their 

 unknown journeyings. As silently as they passed 

 from sight, all human history enacted in this vast 

 province of nature s empire has vanished, and left 

 no trace of itself save here and there a bit of drift 

 wood. There lies the unconquered and forever 

 inviolate kingdom of forces over which no human 

 skill will ever cast the net of conquest. 



The sea speaks to the imagination as no other 

 aspect of the natural world does, because of its 

 vastness, its immeasurable and overwhelming 

 power, its exclusion from human history, its free, 

 buoyant, changeful being. It stands for those 

 strange and unfamiliar revelations with which na 

 ture sometimes breaks in upon our easy relation 

 with her, and brings back on the instant that sense 

 of remoteness which one feels when in intimate fel 

 lowship a friend suddenly lifts the curtain from 



