Wading

“ Deliverance from shoes and stockings, the first thrill of pleasure and surprise at the cool touch of the water, the wild rush along the brim, the dainty advance till the sea covers the little ankles, the tremulous waiting with an air of defiance as the wave deepens round till it touches the knee, the firm line with which the dabblers grasp hand in hand and face the advancing tide, the sudden panic, the break, the disorderly flight, the tears and laughter, the run after the wave as it retreats again, the fresh advance and defiance—this is the paradise of the dabbler. ”

“ Who is so dead to the influences of his surroundings that he has not stood spell-bound upon the shore as the boisterous waves broke with an angry roar at his feet? No sooner has one wave spent its energy than another, with a fury as relentless, rushes madly forward, followed by countless others ”

“ The waves are mighty, and know their might.
"Never have we been vanquished in fight!
We kiss the sands of the yielding shore,
We rend the rock in his pride of power:
Be it soon, be it late, thy fate is sealed;
Be it soon, be it late, thou shalt surely yield!"
And it yields at last: with a headlong leap
It buries its shame in the foaming deep.
And the waves toss high their plumy spray,
As they dance triumphant around their prey. ”

“ A flaw of wind upsets the boat, which fills and sinks, and the men are left to swim for their lives. One says to the other: "It is a long pull to the shore, but the water is warm and we are strong. We will hold by each other, and all will be well." "No," says his friend, "I have lost my breath already; each wave that strikes us knocks it from my body." ”

“ Her courage failed, could not be screwed to the sticking-point; she hung on the oars, and the boat, as if answering to her thought, stopped, swung half around. As she held the boat with the oars and closed her eyes in an anguish of hesitation and terror, a strange convulsion shook her, such as she had felt once before, and a low cry, not her own, broke from her lips. ”

“ Once stout oars were in their hands, however, all was changed. To feel the rise and fall of the boat, to skim the crests of waves, to catch the rhythmic rowing that, like a song in the night, seemed to lift them and bear them down—this was life. ”

“ They have given over their watchfulness, their close observation of marks; the breath of prayer has fallen to a stillness; the waves seem to gleam and ripple and rustle as of old, and how shall the unearnest heart and the unwatchful eye ever know that the tide is going down?—a sinking so gradual, so stealthy, with such slight difference from day to day. ”

“ The spectacle, as observed by those some twenty feet from the ground, might be likened somewhat to a turbulent sea when a sturdy tide sets against the storm, and the mad waves tumble hither and thither, foiled, and impelled, yet for all the confusion and obstruction moving in one direction with a sweep and a force that no power could chain. ”

“ Amen, have taken their place among them; the heavenly gale will reach some of the old backsliders, and they are brought, with weeping, to seek their forfeited privilege; by this time the sound of Almighty God will be heard in the outer court, beginning to move the hearers like a mighty wind shaking the forest; and as the gale blows upon the outer court, upon the hearers, and the young people, and afterwards making its way through the outer court, to rouse the inner court, until a great concern is awakened for the state of the soul. ”

“ Borne up by each wave as it passes, drawn down by each wave that recedes;
I would empty my soul of the dreams that have gathered in me,
I would beat with your heart as it beats, I would follow your soul
as it leads. ”

“ Borne onward at the mercy of the waves—possessing just sufficient control over the boat to keep her head in the proper direction—now losing sight altogether of our consort, and now hanging on the top of the wave while she lay directly under us, we passed the moments in a succession of hopes and fears which no human pen can adequately describe. ”

“ We hear as we walk the wandering sound of "the vagrant, casual wind," but there is something in its rise and fall, and rising again, that has kinship with the flow and ebb and onrush of the lingering, punctual waves on the shore. ”

“ But as soon as all human vestiges disappear, the imperceptible human waif on the sea, alone with nature, trembles in full revelation of his paltriness. The colossal surroundings daunt him, and he acknowledges it is folly to struggle with the waves that multitudinously mount up to swamp him from all sides. ”

“ And one sits and listens to the perpetual roar, and watches the unending procession, and feels tiny and fragile before this tremendous force expressing itself in fury and foam and sound. Indeed, one feels microscopically small, and the thought that one may wrestle with this sea raises in one's imagination a thrill of apprehension, almost of fear. ”

“ Yet nowhere could we discover any brute or creature upon which to ease our vengeance, and so, presently, the valley becoming impassable by reason of the heat, the flying sparks and the abundance of the acrid dust, we made back to the body of the boy, and bore him thence to the shore. ”

“ The wave, lashed into fury, that comes on, mountain-swollen, all rage, and froth, and thunder, to dash itself into spray against some Atlas of the Deep—some huge brother of Time, whose cheeks the wings of the centuries caress, and of whose hand storms that distract heaven and earth are but toys. ”

“ He is inevitably marked, to ear and eye, as the legendary ninth wave, the foamiest green breaker of the line, ever re-forming and breaking, so long as he is visible, brighter, taller, and farther in-shore than the rest. ”

“ While the breezes they blow—
It's off for a sailor thy father would go;
And it's here in the harbor, in sight of the sea,
He hath left his wee babe with my song and with me"
⁠"Swing high and swing low
⁠While the breezes they blow!"
⁠Swing high and swing low
⁠While the breezes they blow—
It's oh for the waiting as weary days go!
And it's oh for the heartache that smiteth me when
I sing my song over and over again:
⁠"Swing high and swing low
⁠While the breezes they blow!" ”

“ They resemble, therefore, the waverers: for the wavering are neither withered nor green, being neither living nor dead. For as their blades, on seeing the sun, were withered, so also the wavering, when they hear of affliction, on account of their fear, worship idols, and are ashamed of the name of their Lord. ”

“ In the flowing tide they see not merely a symbol, but a cause of exuberance, of prosperity, and of life, while in the ebbing tide they discern a real agent as well as a melancholy emblem of failure, of weakness, and of death. ”

“ Ah! we seek in vain to spread our wings; there is too much slime upon them; the body is an anchor that holds the soul fast to earth; in vain does it spread its sails to the breeze of the loftiest ideas, the vessel remains immovable, as if all the sucking-fishes in the ocean were clinging to its keel. Nature takes delight in hurling such sarcasms at us. ”

“ And when I did not die, when the savage sea, like a great beast of prey, let me live by gasps to spread its enjoyment the more, and tossed and teased me, and shouted so hideous in my ears and weighed me down—why, the last spark of spirit in me burnt up on a sudden, fierce and angry. ”

“ For, after all, a gale of wind, the thing of mighty sound, is inarticulate. It is man who, in a chance phrase, interprets the elemental passion of his enemy. Thus there is another gale in my memory, a thing of endless, deep, humming roar, moonlight, and a spoken sentence. ”

“ I can by a word deprive her every limb of motion. If I but wave this wand, the leaden God of sleep shall sink her in a moment in the arms of forgetfulness, whatever were before her anxieties and her wakeful terrors. ”

“ If highly excited, you rock boldly back, even to the extremity of danger; if pleasantly and moderately stimulated, you lull yourself with a gentle motion, like the motion that little waves give to a pleasure boat. ”

“ Waves.—To dream that you are on the sea-shore, and surrounded by the waves, is an indication that you will be shortly placed in very difficult and distressing circumstances, out of which it will require all your energy and perseverance to escape. ”

“ But, when the apparently dead man moved again, and when, finally, the body, which appeared so destitute of life, rolled into the stream, and floated away with the tide, their fright might be considered to have reached its climax. ”

“ The waves still rolled, the rock still stood in dreadful gloom, the serpent still wound its frightful coils, but the scattered planks of the broken vessel were driven round and round by the mad whirlpool, and those who a moment before had smiled in the fulness of life and happiness now wrestled with the waves. Strong men among them, who would not part from life without a struggle, grasped after floating planks, raised themselves above the waves, and looked round for their dear ones. ”

“ Perhaps I shall hear a solitary loon laugh as he dives and plumes himself, or shall see a lonely fisher in his boat, like a floating leaf, beholding his form reflected in the waves, where lately a hundred men securely labored. ”

“ Waiting on the shore and wailing.
Spake the ancient Wainamoinen:
"Why art weeping, goodly vessel,
What the cause of thy lamenting?
Art thou mourning for thy row-locks,
Is thy rigging ill-adjusted? ”

“ A wave strikes her as she reaches it, and dashes her once more to the ground. For a second time she is swept like a straw along the deck, and for the second time the ebb arrests her progress, and leaves her in the same position as before. ”

“ So though the name and form of wave could never be without water that was fashioned into the wave by them, yet the name and form themselves were not the wave. They die as soon as ever it returns to water. ”

“ The wave which is breaking into foam, which is rippling over the pebbles, which throws up the broken water, which falls back on to the land and makes music, sound, melody as it breaks—that is the wave which is nearly over; it is the wave whose course is run. ”

“ How frequently do circumstances, at first sight the most trivial and unimportant, exercise a mighty and permanent influence on our habits and pursuits!—how frequently is a stream turned aside from its natural course by some little rock or knoll, causing it to make an abrupt turn! ”

“ And with that he threw her into the river, and she sank once, and she sank twice, and just before she was about to sink for the third time she put her hand up into the air, out of the water, and made a motion with her first and middle finger as if she were moving the scissors. ”

“ The grayness of the whole immense surface, the wind furrows upon the faces of the waves, the great masses of foam, tossed about and waving, like matted white locks, give to the sea in a gale an appearance of hoary age, lustreless, dull, without gleams, as though it had been created before light itself.
Looking back after much love and much trouble, the instinct of primitive man, who seeks to personify the forces of Nature for his affection and for his fear, is awakened again in the breast of one civilized beyond that stage even in his infancy. ”

“ The swimming in the head, the sea of faces dimly seen, the weakness in the knees, dryness of the tongue and throat, confusion of thought and general helplessness experienced, will help them to realise her emotions. ”

“ To keep to the waves, I forget who it is who represents a man in despair, desiring that his body may be cast into the sea,
"Whose changing mound, and foam that passed away,
Might mock the eye that questioned where I lay."
Observe, there is not a single false, or even overcharged, expression. "Mound" of the sea wave is perfectly simple and true; "changing" is as familiar as may be; "foam that passed away," strictly literal; and the whole line descriptive of the reality with a degree of accuracy which I know not any other161 verse, in the range of poetry, that altogether equals. ”

“ O love, by the light of thine eyes We will fare over-sea; We will be As the silver-winged herons that rest By the shallows, The shallows of sapphire stone; No more shall we wander alone. As the foam to the shore Is my spirit to thine, And God’s serfs as they fly,— The Mockers of Death— They will breathe on the embers of fire We shall live by that breath. Sweet, thy heart to my heart, As we journey afar, No more, nevermore, to return! ”

“ When the poet calls this the wave of the world, you must not understand world to mean our planet only, but the universe, the cosmos; and the wave is the great wave of impermanency, including all forces of time and death and life and pain. ”

“ He cannot resist the muse. As we ascend the stream, plying the paddle with might and main, snatched and impetuous thoughts course through the brain. We dream of conflict, power and grandeur; but turn the prow down stream, and rock, tree, kine, knoll, assuming new and varying positions, as wind and water shift the scene, favor the liquid lapse of thought, far-reaching and sublime, but ever calm and gently undulating. ”

“ A lull of a few seconds follows, and then the broad, mighty torrent of the wind bursts upon them in its uninterrupted fury, and for a while it seems as if they must be swept away by its persistent, tremendous force. ”

“ Waves rise, each to its individual height in a seeming attitude of unrelenting competition, but only up to a certain point; and thus we know of the great repose of the sea to which they are all related, and to which they must all return in a rhythm which is marvellously beautiful. ”

“ The stream of birth had flung the tender bud before me, and the flood of death had wafted the same flower, now in full bloom, to me and to none else. One more wave and we shall be swept away from this extreme point of the earth, torn from the stalks on which we now sit apart, and made one in death. ”