I. Origin of Sea Bathing, 329
II. Choice of Coast, 340
III. The House, 349
IV. First Aspiration of the Sea, 360
V. Baths. Restoration of Beauty, 369
VI. The Restoration of Heart and Brotherhood, 377
VII. The New Life of the Nations, 388
Notes. 401
BOOK FIRST.
A GLANCE UPON THE SEAS.
CHAPTER I.
THE SEA AS SEEN FROM THE SHORE.
A gallant Dutch seaman, a cool and stern observer, who has passed his
whole life at sea, frankly tells us that his feeling on first seeing
the ocean was _fear_. For all terrestrial animals, water is the
non-respirable element, the ever heaving but inevitably asphyxiating
enemy; the fatal and eternal barrier between the two worlds. We need
not, all things being considered, be at all surprised, if that immense
mass of waters which we call the sea, dark and inscrutable in its
immense depths, ever and always impresses the human mind with a vague
and resistless awe.
The imaginative Orientals see it only and call it only, as, the _Night
of the Depths_. In all the antique tongues, from India to Ireland, the
synonymous or analogous name of the sea is either _Night_ or the
_Desert_.
Ah! With what a great and a hallowed and a hallowing, with what an at
once soothing and subduing melancholy it is that, evening after
evening, we see the Sun, that great world's joy, that brilliant,
life-quickening, and light-giving Sun of all that lives, fade, sink,
die--though so surely to rise and live again! Ah! as that glorious
light departs, how tenderly do we think of the human loves that have
died from us--of the hour when we, also, shall thus depart from human
ken, lost, for the time, to this world--to shine more gloriously in
that other world, now dark, distant, unknown, but certain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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