OFF SHORE. 43 



some great experience hitherto unsuspected. In 

 the vast sweep of life through Nature there must 

 always be aspects of awful strangeness ; great 

 realms of mystery will remain unexplored, and al 

 most inaccessible to human thought ; days will 

 dawn at intervals in which those who love most and 

 are nearest Nature will feel an impenetrable cloud 

 over all things, and be suddenly smitten with a 

 sense of weakness ; the greatest of all her interpre 

 ters are but children in knowledge of her mighty 

 activities and forces. On the sea this sense of re 

 moteness and strangeness comes oftener than in 

 the presence of any other natural form ; even the 

 mountains make sheltered places for our thought at 

 their feet, or along their precipitous ledges ; but 

 the sea makes no concessions to our human weak 

 ness, and leaves the message which it intones with 

 the voice of tempest and the roar of surge without 

 an interpreter. Men have come to it in all ages, 

 full of a passionate desire to catch its meaning and 

 enter into its secret, but the thought of the bold 

 est of them has only skirted its shores, and the vast 

 sweep of untamed waters remains as on the first 

 day. Homer has given us the song of the land 

 locked sea, but where has the ocean found a hu 

 man voice that is not lost and forgotten when it 

 speaks to us in its own penetrating tones ? The 

 mountains stand revealed in more than one inter 

 pretation, touched by their own sublimity, but the 

 sea remains silent in human speech, because no 



