It seems to me that no man born and truthful¹ to himself could declare that he ever saw the sea looking young as the earth looks young in spring. But some of us, regarding the ocean with understanding and affection, have seen it looking old, as if the immemorial ages had been stirred up from the undisturbed bottom of ooze². For it is a gale³ of wind that makes the sea look old.

From a distance of years, looking at the remembered aspects of the storms lived through, it is that impression which disengages itself clearly from the great body of impressions left by many years of intimate contact.

If you would know the age of the earth, look upon the sea in a storm. The grayness of the whole immense surface, the wind furrows⁴ upon the faces of the waves, the great masses of foam⁵, tossed about and waving, like matted white locks, give to the sea in a gale an appearance of hoary⁶ age, lustreless⁷, dull, without gleams, as though it had been created before light itself.

Looking back after much love and much trouble, the instinct of primitive⁸ man, who seeks to personify the forces of Nature for his affection and for his fear, is awakened⁹ again in the breast of one civilized¹⁰ beyond that stage even in his infancy¹¹. One seems to have known gales¹² as enemies, and even as enemies one embraces them in that affectionate regret which clings to the past.

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