Sentimental reciter/The Ocean

THE OCEAN.

Most, if not all of you, who are now present, have beheld the Ocean; some of you, many times, so that you have become familiar with it. Others of you have been often upon it; and to some of you, perhaps, through the duties of your profession, it may, without impropriety, be styled your element.

But every individual present, who can remember the first instance in which that boundless expanse of waters presented itself to his view, can also remember the wonder, amounting perhaps even to speechless astonishment, with which that first prospect filled his mind.

Those of you that have often beheld it, although familiarity should have put an end to all sensations of astonishment, yet must have been impressed at times with its regular ebbing and flowing, with the beauty of its surface when calm, or the still greater beauty of that surface when dimpled by soft breezes into myriads of smiles—must not unfrequently have been struck with the sudden and dazzling whiteness of its foam, when the last wave is broken along the shore,—with its incessant roaring when disturbed by heavy gales—and especially when, agitated and roused by storms, it pours its liquid mountains upon the rock, with a noise that drowns the loudest peals of heaven’s own thunder. I say, those who have seen it under these different aspects, will have often been excited by their feelings, yet not without the full consent of their understanding, to cry out, “This must be the work of God; yes, the sea is his, and he made it!”

Those to whom their profession has made the watery world their element, have been still more feelingly impressed with sentiments of this nature. The calm that impeded their course; the favouring gales that pleasurably wrafted them to their desired haven; the bounding billows which bore them along as in a joyous dance; the howling tempest which gave the stoutest ship the rapid motion of an eagle’s flight; the imperious surge that lifted them to heaven, then sunk them down as low in the yawning abyss, which irresistibly drove them upon the fatal sand, or dashed them in shipwreck upon the pointed and resistless rock,—these told them in accents loud as the last trumpet’s voice,—“The sea is God’s, and he made it!”

Edwards.