Loti has brought to the colouring of his books.

He has related to us how, when still a little child, he first beheld
the sea. He had escaped from the parental home, allured by the brisk and
pungent air and by the "peculiar noise, at once feeble and great," which
could be heard beyond little hills of sand to which led a certain path.
He recognised the sea; "before me something appeared, something sombre
and noisy, which had loomed up from all sides at once, and which seemed
to have no end; a moving expanse which struck me with mortal vertigo;
. . . above was stretched out full a sky all of one piece, of a dark gray
colour like a heavy mantle; very, very far away, in unmeasurable depths
of horizon, could be seen a break, an opening between sea and sky,
a long empty crack, of a light pale yellow." He felt a sadness
unspeakable, a sense of desolate solitude, of abandonment, of exile. He
ran back in haste to unburden his soul upon his mother's bosom, and,
as he says, "to seek consolation with her for a thousand anticipated,
indescribable pangs, which had wrung my heart at the sight of that vast
green, deep expanse."

A poet of the sea had been born, and his genius still bears a trace of
the shudder of fear experienced that evening by Pierre Loti the little
child.

Loti was born not far from the ocean, in Saintonge, of an old Huguenot
family which had numbered many sailors among its members. While yet
a mere child he thumbed the old Bible which formerly, in the days of
persecution, had been read only with cautious secrecy; and he perused
the vessel's ancient records wherein mariners long since gone had noted,
almost a century before, that "the weather was good," that "the wind
was favourable," and that "doradoes or gilt-heads were passing near the