which gives the last secret of beauty to water. The 

 All else that we look upon is opaque : the Sea-Spell, 

 mountain in its sundown purple or noon-azure, 

 the meadows and fields, the gathered greenness 

 of woods, the loveliness of massed flowers, the 

 myriad wonder of the universal grass, even the 

 clouds that trail their shadows upon the hills 

 or soar so high into frozen deeps of azure that 

 they pass shadowless like phantoms or the 

 creatures of dreams — the beauty of all these is 

 opaque. But the beauty of water is that it is 

 transparent. Think if the grass, if the leaves 

 of the tree, if the rose and the iris and the pale 

 horns of the honeysuckle, if the great mountains 

 built of grey steeps of granite and massed 

 purple of shadow were thus luminous, thus 

 transparent ! Think if they, too, as the sea, 

 could reflect the passage of saffron-sailed and 

 rose-flusht argosies of cloud, or mirror as in 

 the calms of ocean the multitudinous undula- 

 tion of the blue sky ! This divine translucency 

 is but a part of the Sea-Spell, which holds us 

 from childhood to old age in wonder and 

 delight, but that part is its secret joy, its 

 incommunicable charm. 



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