One can hardly gaze upon the great ocean without feelings akin to awe and reverence. Whether viewed from some promontory where the eye seeks in vain another resting-place, or when sailing over the deep, one looks around on the unbounded expanse of waters, the sea must always give rise to ideas of infinite space and indefinable mystery hardly paralleled by anything of the earth itself. Beneficent in its calmer aspect, when the silvery moon lights up the ripples and the good ship scuds along before a favouring breeze; terrible in its might, when its merciless breakers dash upon some rock-girt coast, carrying the gallant bark to destruction, or when, rising mountains high, the spars quiver and snap before the tempest’s power, it is always grand, sublime, irresistible. The great highway of commerce and source of boundless supplies, it is, notwithstanding its terrors, infinitely more man’s friend than his enemy. In how great a variety of aspects may it not be viewed! The poets have seen in it a “type of the Infinite,” and one of the greatest(1) has taken us back to those early days of earth’s history when God said— “‘Let there be firmament Amid the waters, and let it divide The waters from the waters.’ ... So He the world Built on circumfluous waters calm, in wide Crystalline ocean.” “Water,” said the great Greek lyric poet,(2) “is the chief of all.” The ocean covers nearly three-fourths of the surface of our globe. Earth is its mere offspring. The continents and islands have been and _still are being_ elaborated from its depths. All in all, it has not, however, been treated fairly at the hands of the poets, too many of whom could only see it in its sterner lights. Young speaks of it as merely a “Dreadful and tumultuous home Of dangers, at eternal war with man, Wide opening and loud roaring still for more,” ignoring the blessings and benefits it has bestowed so freely, forgetting that man is daily becoming more and more its master, and that his own country in particular has most successfully conquered the seemingly unconquerable. Byron, again, says:— “Roll on, thou dark and deep blue ocean—roll! Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain; Man marks the earth with ruin—his control Stops with the shore; upon the watery plain The wrecks are all thy deeds.”