When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at last upon the great

South Sea... now the long supplication of my youth was

answered,, that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a thousand

leagues of blue. There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about

this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some h~dden

soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over

the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-

pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters Fields of all four

continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow

unceasingly;for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows,

drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives

and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in

their beds; ~he ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.

To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld,

must ever be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the midmost waters of

the world, the Indian ocean andAtlantic being but its arms. The

same waves wash the moles of the new-built California towns, but

yesterday planted by the recentest race of men and lave the faded but

still gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all

between float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless,

unknown Archipelagoes, and impenetrableJapans. Thus this

mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world s whole bulk about,.

makes all coasts one bay to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth.

Lifted by those eternal swells, you needs must own the seductive god,

bowingyou r head to Pan.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick