Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/238

208 said Hazlitt, "ever thinks he shall die." He recognizes death, but it concerns him not. The Greek accepted it as a natural process; he yielded to nature; we adjure her, as Manfred adjured his spirits, and fain would compel her to our service and demand her to surrender the eternal secret.

Nature, even in her most tranquil mood, is palpitant Why Nature yields solace and companionship, with motion, in view of which Humboldt was at times a poet. Motion is life, and therefore fellowship. Herein lies the spell of the sea, which has mastered Heine and Shelley and every poetic soul. Its perpetual change, eternal endurance—these image both life and immortality; its far-away vessels moving to unknown climes, its unbounded horizon suggesting infinity, buoy the imagination, and thence come human passion and thoughts "too deep for tears." We have conquered it, and it is the modern poet's comrade, as it was the ancient's fear and marvel. But what is the sea? Tennyson's "still salt pool, lock'd in with bars of sand," would be an ocean to a man reduced to insect size,—a stretch of water, infused with salt, and roughened into wavelets by the air that moves across it. We have learned that the effect of the sea, of a prairie, of a mountain, is purely relative. One of the latest "Atlantic" novelists, with youth's contemporaneousness, realizes both the fact and the dream. Her lovers are watching "a big, red, distorted moon above the illimitable palpitating waste "of the ocean:—