The greatest scene of potential terror, a devouring
enigma of space. Yes. But our lives have been nothing if not a
continuous defiance of what you can do and what you may hold; a spiritual
and material defiance carried on in our plucky cockleshells on and on
beyond the successive provocations of your unreadable horizons."
Ah, but the charm of the sea! Oh, yes, charm enough. Or rather a sort
of unholy fascination as of an elusive nymph whose embrace is death, and
a Medusa's head whose stare is terror. That sort of charm is calculated
to keep men morally in order. But as to sea-salt, with its particular
bitterness like nothing else on earth, that, I am safe to say, penetrates
no further than the seamen's lips. With them the inner soundness is
caused by another kind of preservative of which (nobody will be surprised
to hear) the main ingredient is a certain kind of love that has nothing
to do with the futile smiles and the futile passions of the sea.
Being love this feeling is naturally naive and imaginative. It has also
in it that strain of fantasy that is so often, nay almost invariably, to
be found in the temperament of a true seaman.
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