Descend to even a slight depth in the sea, and the beauty and brilliancy of the upper light are lost; you enter into a persistent twilight, and misty and half-lurid haze; a little lower, and even that sinister and eldritch twilight is lost, and all around you is Night, showing nothing, but suggesting everything that darkness,--handmaiden of terrible Fancy--can suggest. Above, below, beneath, all around, darkness, utter darkness, save when, from time to time, the swift and gracefully terrible motion of some passing monster of the deep makes "darkness visible" for a brief moment--and, then, that passing gleam leaves you in darkness more dense, more utter, more terrible, than ever. Immense in its extent, enormous in its depth, that mass of waters which covers the greater part of our globe seems, in truth, a great world of shadows and of gloom. And it is that which, above all, at once fascinates and intimidates us. Darkness and Fear! Twin sisters, they! In the early day, the at once timid and unreasoning Childhood of our race, men imagined that where no Light was, neither could there be Life; that in the unfathomed depths, there was a black, lifeless, soundless, Chaos; above, nought but water and gloom,--beneath, sand, and shells, the bones of the wrecked mariner, the rich wares of the far off, ruined, and vainly bewailing merchant;--those sad treasures of "that ever-receiving and never-restoring treasury--the Sea." The waters of the sea afford us no encouragement by their transparency. Look not there for the seductive, brightly sparkling, and ever-smiling nymph of the fountain. Opaque, heavy, mighty, merciless, your sea is a liquid Polyphemus, a blind giant that cares not, reasons not, feels not--but hits a terribly hard blow. Trust yourself upon that vast and ever-heaving bosom, bold swimmer, and marvellously will you be upheld; the mighty thing that upholds you dominates you, too; you are a mere weak child, upheld, indeed, for the instant by a giant-hand--in another moment that giant-hand may smite you with a giant's fatal force. Her anchor once tripped, who can tell whither the good ship may be urged by some sudden wind, or some unsuspected but irresistible current? Thus it was that our northern fishermen, not only without their intention, but even in spite of it, discovered polar America, and supped full of the horrors of funereal Greenland. Not a nation upon the earth but has its tales and traditions of the sea. Homer and the _Arabian Nights_, have handed down to us a goodly number of those frightful legends, of shoals and tempests and of calms no less murderous than tempests,--those calms during which the hardiest sailor agonizes, moans, loses all courage and all hope in the tortures of the hours, days, haply even weeks, when, with cracked lip and blood-shotten eye, he has around him, heaving upward and sinking downward, but never progressing a cable's length, "Water, water, everywhere, But not a drop to drink."