We have our hand on the throb of the current turning in a
salting river inland between green hills; we are borne upon it bodily as
we sail, its movement kicks the tiller in our grasp, and the strength
beneath us and around us, the rush and the compulsion of the stream, its
silence and as it were its purpose, all represent to us, immediately and
here, that immeasurable to and fro which rules the skies.
When the Roman soldiers came marching northward with Caesar and first
saw the shores of ocean: when, after that occupation of Gaul which has
changed the world, they first mounted guard upon the quays of the Itian
port under Gris-Nez, or the rocky inlets of the Veneti by St. Malo and
the Breton reefs, they were appalled to see what for centuries chance
traders and the few curious travellers, the men of Marseilles and of the
islands, had seen before them. They saw in numbers and in a corporate
way what hitherto individuals alone had seen; they saw the sea like a
living thing, advancing and retreating in an ordered dance, alive with
deep sighs and intakes, and ceaselessly proceeding about a work and a
doing which seemed to be the very visible action of an unchanging will
still pleased with calculated change. It was the presence of the Roman
army upon the shores of the Channel which brought the Tide into the
general conscience of Europe, and that experience, I think, was among
the greatest, perhaps the greatest, of those new things which rushed
upon the mind of the Empire when it launched itself by the occupation of
Gaul.
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