But if the pessimistic mood may thus find support in watching the waves of the sea, so no less surely can the hopeful and joyous mood be evolved and stimulated by the same influence. Before Sophocles came AEschylus. The greatest hero of this earlier poet was Prometheus, the friend of man, who, tortured but unshaken, looked out from his Caucasian rock on the presentments of primeval nature. How sublime his appeal! "Ether of heaven, and Winds untired of wing, Rivers whose fountains fail not, and thou Sea Laughing in waves innumerable!" To him the winds and waves brought a message of untiring, indomitable energy--the movement, the gleam, inspired fresh life and hope. The ideas immanent in the ocean wave are as varied as the human experiences to which they are akin. Or take another group of these ideas immanent in the phenomena of the wave--the group which rouse and nurture the aesthetic side of man's nature. Very significant in this regard is the fact that not for the Greeks alone, but also for the Hindus and the Teutons, the goddesses of beauty were wave-born. When Aphrodite walked the earth, flowers sprang up beneath her feet; but her birthplace was the crest of a laughing wave. So Kama, the Hindu Cupid, and the Apsaras, lovely nymphs, rose from the wind-stirred surface of the sea, drawn upward in streaming mists by the ardent sun. So, too, the Teutonic Freyja took shape in the sea-born cloudlets of the upper air. The loveliness of the wave, dancing, tossing, or breaking must have entered, from earliest days, deeply into the heart and imagination of man, and have profoundly influenced his mythology, his art, and his poetry. We trace this influence in olden days by the myths of Poseidon with his seahorses and the bands of Tritons, Nereids, and Oceanides--each and all giving substance to vague intuitions and subconscious perceptions of the physical beauty of the ocean. And as for our own more immediate forefathers, the mystic spell of the ocean wave sank deep into their rugged souls. "When you so dance" (says Shakespeare to a maiden) "I wish you a wave o' the sea, that you might ever do nothing but that." The experiences of countless watchers of the wave went to the framing of that wish! And, as has been richly proved by quotations from our modern poets, the mystic spell gains in potency as man's aesthetic powers are keener and more disciplined. The present-day nature-mystic needs no imaginary personifications to bring him into communion with the beauty, the mystery, of the ocean wave. He conceives of it as a manifestation of certain modes of being which are akin to himself and which speak to him in language too plain to be ignored or misinterpreted. Human knowledge has not yet advanced far enough to define more closely such modes of experience; but the fact of the experience remains. CHAPTER XXIX STILL WATERS