MYSTERY OF THE SEA. 



27 



our while to ponder and digest. Its gradual submission to in- 

 vasion from the land, its successive surrender of the islands in 

 the tropics and the ice-mountains at the poles, its slow but 

 certain release of its secrets, its final abandonment of its ex- 

 clusiveness, form — with a multitude of attendant incidents, acci- 

 dents, battles, disasters, shipwrecks, famines, robberies, mutinies, 

 piracies — the theme and purpose of these pages. 



Although the ocean has lost its terrors and has given up its 

 dominion of dread over the mind of man, it is still poetic, and 

 has been often made to assume a profound moral significance 

 and furnish apt religious illustrations. In this connection, we 

 cannot do better than to quote, from Dr. Greenwood's "Poetry 

 and Mystery of the Sea," a passage which strongly and beauti- 

 fully enforces this view: — 



a 'The sea is his, and He made it,' cries the Psalmist of 

 Israel, in one of those bursts of enthusiasm in which he so 

 often expresses the whole of a vast subject by a few simple 

 words. Whose else, indeed, could it be, and by whom else could 

 it have been made? Who else can heave its tides and appoint 

 its bounds? Who else can urge its mighty waves to madness 

 with the breath and wings of the tempest, and then speak to it 

 again in a master's accents and bid it be still? Who else could 

 have peopled it with its countless inhabitants, and caused it to 

 bring forth its various productions, and filled it from its deepest 

 bed to its expanded surface, filled it from its centre to its re- 

 motest shores, filled it to the brim with beauty and mystery and 

 power ? Majestic Ocean ! Glorious Sea ! No created being 

 rules thee or made thee. 



"What is there more sublime than the trackless, desert, all- 

 surrounding, unfathomable sea ? What is there more peacefully 

 sublime than the calm, gently-heaving, silent sea? What is 

 there more terribly sublime than the angry, dashing, foaming 

 sea? Power — resistless, overwhelming power — is its attribute 

 and its expression, whether in the careless, conscious grandeur 



