earthly. They couldn't be that. Chance or desire (mostly desire) had
set them apart, often in their very childhood; and what is to be remarked
is that from the very nature of things this early appeal, this early
desire, had to be of an imaginative kind. Thus their simple minds had a
sort of sweetness. They were in a way preserved. I am not alluding here
to the preserving qualities of the salt in the sea. The salt of the sea
is a very good thing in its way; it preserves for instance one from
catching a beastly cold while one remains wet for weeks together in the
"roaring forties." But in sober unpoetical truth the sea-salt never gets
much further than the seaman's skin, which in certain latitudes it takes
the opportunity to encrust very thoroughly. That and nothing more. And
then, what is this sea, the subject of so many apostrophes in verse and
prose addressed to its greatness and its mystery by men who had never
penetrated either the one or the other? The sea is uncertain, arbitrary,
featureless, and violent. Except when helped by the varied majesty of
the sky, there is something inane in its serenity and something stupid in
its wrath, which is endless, boundless, persistent, and futile--a grey,
hoary thing raging like an old ogre uncertain of its prey. Its very
immensity is wearisome. At any time within the navigating centuries
mankind might have addressed it with the words: "What are you, after all?
Oh, yes, we know. The greatest scene of potential terror, a devouring
enigma of space. Yes. But our lives have been nothing if not a
continuous defiance of what you can do and what you may hold; a spiritual
and material defiance carried on in our plucky cockleshells on and on
beyond the successive provocations of your unreadable horizons."

Ah, but the charm of the sea! Oh, yes, charm enough. Or rather a sort
of unholy fascination as of an elusive nymph whose embrace is death, and
a Medusa's head whose stare is terror. That sort of charm is calculated
to keep men morally in order. But as to sea-salt, with its particular