Or he would be seated with the helm in his hand, and all the force and the
joy wherewith she dashed headlong on the rising waves, and half pierced
them and half drove them under her triumphant keel, would be issuing from
his will and his triumph.
"Surely even for the sad despairing waves there is some hope, out in that
boundless room which borders on the sky, and upon which, even in the
gloomiest hour of tempest, falls sometimes from heaven a glory intense.
"So when the time came that the lover of waters must return, he went back
enriched with new visions of them in their great home and motherland, he
had seen them still and silent as a soul in holy trance; he had seen them
raving in a fury of livid green, swarming with 'white-mouthed waves;' he
had seen them lying in one narrow ridge of unbroken blue, where the eye,
finding no marks to measure the distance withal, saw miles as furlongs;
and he had seen sweeps and shadows innumerable stretched along its calm
expanse, so dividing it into regions, and graduating the distance, that
the eye seemed to wander on and on from sea to sea, and the ships to float
in oceans beyond oceans of infinite reach.
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