The Ocean! What is its mystic significance? A question as fraught with living issues as its physical object is spacious and profound. Infinitely varied and yet unchanging; gentle and yet terrible; radiant and yet awful; "Calm or convulsed, in breeze, or gale, or storm, Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime Dark heaving"-- there is not a mood with which the ocean cannot link itself, nor a problem to which it cannot hint, albeit darkly, a solution. To attempt a description of its external phenomena were a hardy task--much more to grapple with its protean influences on the souls of men. Let the approach be by way of mythology. It was shown how that Thales was partly guided to his choice of Water as the _Welt-stoff_ by its place and function in the ancient cosmologies. Numerous and widely diffused were the myths of a primeval ocean out of which the structured universe arose. The Babylonian tablet tells of the time before the times "when above were not raised the heavens, and below on the earth a plant had not grown up; the abyss also had not broken up its boundary. The chaos, the sea, was the producing mother of them all." A passage from the Rig Veda speaks likewise of the time, or rather the no-time, which preceded all things. "Death was not then, nor immortality; there was no distinction of day or night. Only _Something_ breathed without breath, inwardly turned towards itself. Other than it there was nothing." And how did these ancient mystics best picture to themselves the primeval, or timeless, _Something_?--"What was the veiling cover of everything?"--they themselves ask. And they answer with another question--"Was it the water's deep abyss?" They think of it as "an ocean without light." "Then (say they) from the nothingness enveloped in empty gloom, Desire (Love) arose, which was the first germ of mind. This loving impulse the Sages, seeking in their heart, recognised as the bond between Being and Non-Being." How deep the plunge here into the sphere of abstract thought! Yet so subtle and forceful had been the mystic influence of the ocean on the primitive mind that it declares itself as a working element in their abstrusest speculations. Nor has this mystic influence as suggesting the mysteries of origin ceased to be operative. Here is Tennyson, addressing his new-born son: "Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep." And again, when nearing the end of his own life, he strikes the same old mystic chord: "When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home." Wordsworth, of course, felt the power of this ocean-born intuition, and assures us that here and now: "Tho' inland far we be, Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither." And of intense interest as modernising the ancient concept of "_Something_ which breathed without breath," is his appeal: