S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.
Ocean
Of all objects which I have ever seen, there is none which affects my imagination so much as the sea, or ocean. I cannot see the heavings of this prodigious bulk of waters, even in a calm, without a very pleasing astonishment; but when it is worked up in a tempest, so that the horizon on every side is nothing but foaming billows and floating mountains, it is impossible to describe the agreeable horror that rises from such a prospect.
A lady, on seeing the sea at Brighton for the first time, exclaimed, “What a beautiful field!” She had never seen such a beautiful green, moving, sparkling, grassy prairie. Mr. Leigh Hunt lavished a page of admiration in The Liberal upon a line of Ariosto’s describing the waves as
“Neptune’s white herds lowing o’er the deep.”
Anacreon exclaims, in language appropriate to calm seas and smooth sand-beaches, “How the waves of the sea kiss the shore!” Saint-Lambert, in his Saisons, has four lines descriptive of the waves of a stormy sea dashing upon the beach, which have been much admired by writers upon imitative harmony. “Neptune has raised up his turbulent plains, the sea falls and leaps upon the trembling shores. She remounts, groans, and with redoubled blows makes the abyss and the shaken mountains resound.”
Whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and, consequently, the world itself.
