"Listen, the mighty Being is awake, And doth with his eternal motion make A sound like thunder--everlastingly." It will not be possible to do more than draw attention to those chief characteristics of the ocean which have given it so large a place in the minds of men. And first would come the vastness of the sea, which prompts vague intuitions of mystery and infinity. The sight of its limitless expanse still has this power. "The sea (says Holmes) belongs to eternity, and not to time, and of that it sings for ever and ever." How natural, then, the trend of the mythology just mentioned, and the belief in a primeval ocean--a formless abyss--Tiâmat--which, as Milton puts it in a splendid line, is: "The womb of nature and perhaps her grave." But added to the mystic influence of sheer limitlessness are the manifestations of power and majesty, which compel the awe and wonder of those who "go down to the sea in ships and do their business in great waters." In the minds of early navigators, the experience of the terrors of the sea begot a sense of relationship to hostile powers. One of the oldest Aryan words for sea, the German _Meer_, Old English _Mere_, means death or destruction; and the destructive action of the ocean's untutored elementary force found personifications in the Teutonic Oegir (Terror), with his dreaded daughter, and the sea-goddess, Ran, his wife, who raged in storms and overwhelmed the ships. The eastern peoples, including the Hebrews, regarded the sea as the abode of evil powers, as certain of the visions in the Book of Daniel strikingly testify. Nor is this feeling of the action of hostile powers yet extinct. Victor Hugo makes fine use of it in his description of the storm in "The Toilers of the Sea." Jefferies was always deeply affected by the vast-ness and strength of the sea. "Let me launch forth" (he writes) "and sail over the rim of the sea yonder, and when another rim rises over that, and again onwards into an ever-widening ocean of idea and life. For with all the strength of the wave, and its succeeding wave, the depth and race of the tide, the clear definition of the sky; with all the subtle power of the great sea, there rises the equal desire. Give me life strong and full as the brimming ocean; give me thoughts wide as its plain. . . . My soul rising to the immensity utters its desire-prayer with all the strength of the sea." In many of its aspects, the ocean can stimulate and soften moods of sadness. The peculiar potency of the play of the waves is reserved for the next chapter. But the more general influences of this character are many and of undoubted significance. The vast loneliness of its watery, restless plains; its unchangeableness; its seeming disregard for human destinies; the secrets buried under its heaving waters--these and a multitude of like phenomena link themselves on to man's sadder reveries. Morris asks: