The Sea — Jules Michelet

Excerpt:A gallant Dutch seaman, a cool and stern observer, who has passed his whole life at sea, frankly tells us that his feeling on first seeing the ocean was fear. For all terrestrial animals, water is the non-respirable element, the ever heaving but inevitably asphyxiating enemy; the fatal and eternal barrier between the two worlds. We need not, all things being considered, be at all surprised, if that immense mass of waters which we call the sea, dark and inscrutable in its immense depths, ever and always impresses the human mind with a vague and resistless awe.The imaginative Orientals see it only and call it only, as, the Night of the Depths. In all the antique tongues, from India to Ireland, the synonymous or analogous name of the sea is either Night or the Desert.Ah! With what a great and a hallowed and a hallowing, with what an at once soothing and subduing melancholy [12] it is that, evening after evening, we see the Sun, that great world's joy, that brilliant, life-quickening, and light-giving Sun of all that lives, fade, sink, die—though so surely to rise and live again! Ah! as that glorious light departs, how tenderly do we think of the human loves that have died from us—of the hour when we, also, shall thus depart from human ken, lost, for the time, to this world—to shine more gloriously in that other world, now dark, distant, unknown, but certain.