The Sea (La Mer). Jules Michelet

great strong roots they would fly to some climate more genial and some soil more generous; they turn every branch from the sea and towards the earth, as though they were a routed host, disorganized, panic-stricken, and prepared to seek safety in flight. Fixed to the soil, they bend themselves eastward, twisting, writhing, mutely agonized at every new assault of the storm-winds from the seaward. Still nearer to the Sea, the trunk of the tree is slender, its stature dwarfish, and its few poor branches spread themselves confusedly to the horizon. On the shore, on the very margin and boundary line between land and Sea, where the crushed shells rise in a fine and pungent dust, the trees are invaded, covered, choked up with it; their pores are closed, they inhale no air, they are stifled; still living as to form, they are mere petrified trees, spectral trees, melancholy shadows which have not even the privilege of departing—sad prisoners—even in death! Long before we are face to face with the Sea, we can hear and imagine that grand and terrible entity. At first, we hear only a dull, uniform, and distant moaning, which grows louder and louder still, until its majestic roar silences, or covers, all meaner sounds. Very soon we perceive that that roar is not monotonous, but has its alternating notes; its full, rich, mellow tenor, and its round, deep, majestic bass. The pendulum of the clock oscillates less regularly than that alternating moan and roar of the Ocean in its grand unrest. And this latter, let me repeat it, has not the monotony of the pendulum, for in "what those wild waves are saying," we feel, or fancy that we feel the thrilling intonations of life. And in fact, at high flood, when wave rears its crest upon wave, immense, electric, there mingles with the tumultuous roaring of the fiercely rushing waters, the sound of the shells and pebbles, and the thousand things animate as well as inanimate that they carry with them in their shoreward rush. When the ebb comes, a soft murmur tells us that, together with the sands, the sea carries back into her depths all with which for a few brief hours the shore had been adorned or enriched.

      And how many other voices hath the mighty sea! Even when least agitated, how her wailings and her deep sighs contrast with the dull dead silence of the deserted shore, which seems to expect, in mute terror, the threatening of that mighty mass which so recently laved it with a gentle and caressing wavelet. And will she not speedily fulfil her threat? I know not, and will not anticipate. I will not, just now, at least, speak of those terrible concerts in which, haply, she ere long will take the principal part; of her duets with the rocks, of the basses, those muttered thunders which she utters in the deep caverns of the rocky shore, or of those strange, wild, weird, shrieking tones in which we seem to recognize the "Help, spare, save me!" of some tortured or fearfully imperilled humanity. No; let us, for the present, contemplate her in her calmer moods; when she is strong, indeed, but not violent.

      CHAPTER II.

      THE BEACH, THE SANDS, AND THE IRON-BOUND COAST.

      We need not be at all surprised if childhood and ignorance are astounded, astonied, when they first find themselves face to face with that vast and mysterious Sphinx of the Great Master's sculpture, the Ocean. Why, in fact, should we be astonished by their gaze of mingled awe, admiration and bewilderment, when we ourselves, despite our early culture and life-long experience, see so much in the great Riddle of that great Sphinx which we cannot even hope to explain?

      What is the real extent of the ocean? That it is greater than that of the earth is about as much as, conscientiously, we can at all positively affirm. On the entire surface of our globe, water is the Generality—land the Exception. But what is their relative proportion? That, water covers four-fifths of the globe is probable, though, some say a third or a fourth. It is difficult, not to say impossible, to answer the question precisely. A bold explorer discovers a polar land, lays it down, latitude and longitude, with scientific precision; in the very next year an equally bold and no less scientific adventurer seeks it in vain; and in all latitudes immense shoals and lovely Coral islands form in the dark depths, rise to the surface, and disappear, just as suddenly and unaccountably as they arose.

      The real depth of the sea is still less known to us than its extent; we are only at the mere commencement of our early, few, and imperfect soundings.

      The daring little liberties which we take with the surface of the invincible element, and the confidence with which we go hither and thither upon its unsounded depths, have really nothing to say against the grand and well-founded pride of the Ocean, impenetrable as she is as to her secrets, ever moving yet unchangeable, a reality, yet, in all but a few of her phenomena, as unreal to us as the spectres of our actual dreaming. That those mighty depths contain a whole world, a marvellously great and diversified world, of life, love, war, and reproduction of all sorts and sizes, we must imagine and may already with confidence affirm; but we have only, and barely, touched upon the threshold of that world. We are in such a hurry to leave that strange and hostile element! If we need the Ocean, see ye, my brothers, the Ocean in no wise needs us. Nature, fresh from the hand of Deity, scorns the too prying gaze and the too shallow judgment of finite but presumptuous man.

      That very element which we term fluid, shifting, capricious, suffers, in reality, no change; on the contrary it is a very perfect model of regularity. The really and constantly changing creature is Man. His body of this year will have evaporated by this time next year, for, according to Berzolius, four-fifths of our frame are water, which at every instant we yield to the ever craving atmosphere. Fragile and fleeting creature as Man is, he has indeed good reason for reflection and for humility when he finds himself in presence of the great unchanging, and, humanly speaking, unchangeable, powers of nature, just, and grand, glorious, as is his hope, his belief, his certainty of a spiritual immortality. Despite that delightful hope, that confident belief, that sustaining certainty, Man yet is necessarily and terribly saddened by the smiting and strange suddenness with which he hourly sees the thread of man's life forever broken. The Sea seems to exult over our fleeting tenure of a life of which we cannot anticipate, far less command, one added moment. Whenever we approach her, she seems to murmur from her dark, inscrutable depths, unchangeable as His will who made them—"Mortal! to-morrow you shall pass away, but I, I am, and ever shall be, unchanged, unchangeable, mighty and mysterious. The earth will not only receive your bones but will soon convert them into kindred and indistinguishable earth, but I, ever and always, shall remain, main, the same majestic and indifferent entity, the great perfectly balanced Life, daily harmonising myself with the harmonious and majestic life of the bright far worlds that shine above and around you." A stern and a scorning rebuke that is which is given to our poor human pride when, twice in our every mortal day the sea tears from our vexed shores the stony spoils which twice in every day she scornfully and terribly hurls back again. To any imagination but that of the trained and veteran seaman, the fierce rush of the rising tide infallibly suggests the likeness of a fierce and deadly combat; but when the child, or the Savage, observes that the fury of the sea has its inevitable limits, the terror of the child or Savage is turned—true coward-fashion—into an unreasoning compound of hate and rage, and he as fiercely, as impotently, pelts the terrible waves with the very pebbles which without effort, without consciousness, she has cast, heaps upon heaps, by ship loads, at every vast beat of her semi-diurnal pulse! Foaming, roaring, threatening, the waves rush shoreward; the boy observes that though they may kiss, they cannot, at his safe stand-point, submerge his delicate little feet, returns laughter for their roarings, petty pebbles for their impotent threats.

      I saw a battle of this sort at Havre, in July, 1831. A little boy whom I took thither felt his young courage aroused and his young pride stung, by the loud challenges and fierce threats of the incoming tide, and he returned scorn for threat, feebly-thrown pebble for surging and mighty wave. Greatly, aye, laughably unequal was the strife between that small, white, delicate and feeble hand of the young mortal, and the vast and terrible force which cared not about it, feared it not, felt it not, knew it not. Laughably, said I? Ah! no inclination towards laughter remains with us when we reflect upon the fleeting existence, the ephemeral and impotent fragility of our best beloved, our fellows, our Maker's favored, erring, vain-glorious, and, in the last issue, utterly helpless Humanity, when in presence of that tireless and inscrutable Eternity to which we may at any moment be recalled! Such was one of my earliest glances at the Ocean; such the gloomy meditations, only too truly and too sternly realized, that were suggested to me by that combat between the fierce Sea upon which I look so often, and the glad and laughing, and buoyant child upon whom, alas! I shall look, lovingly and anxiously, no