[Greek: glaukon hyper oidma kyanochroa te kymatôn rhothia polia thalassas.] How perfect the description! How exactly in those eight words Euripides draws the picture of the ocean; the long grey heaving swell, the darker steel-grey on the shadowed slope of the waves, and the foam on their breaking crests. Our thoughts flow back as we gaze to the times long ago, when the earth belonged to other races, as it now belongs to us. The ocean is the same as it was. Their eyes saw it as we see it. Time writes no wrinkle on that azure brow. Nor is the ocean alone the same. Human nature is still vexed with the same problems, mocked with the same hopes, wandering after the same illusions. The sea affected the Greeks as it affects us, and was equally dear to them. It was a Greek who said: 'The sea washes off all the ills of men,' the 'stainless one,' as Æschylus called it, the eternally pure. The Romans had in Virgil a poet of the sea, who could attune his lyre to perfect harmony, alike with freshening or subsiding breeze:-- Vela dabant læti et spumas salis ære ruebant. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ferunt ipsa æquora classem, Æquatæ spirant auræ, datur hora quieti. The sea has been the favoured theme of our English poets. There has been none in any language who has excelled our own Byron:-- Oft had he ridden on that wingèd wave, And loved its roughness for the speed it gave. For me, the sea was a dream in my earliest years. I have spent upon its waters some of the brightest, and, alas! some of the saddest of my days; and now, in the autumn of my life, the unforgotten past, and the aims and work of the present, are more than ever bound up with the sea. Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee; Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, Our faith, triumphant o'er our fears, Are all with thee--are all with thee. CHAPTER III CORINTHIAN DEEP-SEA CRUISING BY C. E. SETH-SMITH, C.B.[1] (Late commanding London Brigade Royal Naval Volunteers) [Footnote 1: I am deeply indebted to Mr. D. W. Marsden, late honorary secretary of the London Corps Royal Naval Artillery Volunteers, for his assistance in the compilation of these notes.]