The tide, when it is mentioned in brief historical records of times long
since, suddenly strikes one with vividness and with familiarity, so that
the past is introduced at once, presented to us physically, and obtruded
against our modern senses alive. I know of no other physical thing
mentioned in this fashion, in chronicle or biography, which has so
powerful an effect to restore the reality of a dead century.
The Venerable Bede is speaking in one place of Southampton Water, in his
ecclesiastical history, or, rather, of the Isle of Wight, whence those
two Princes were baptized and died under Cadwalla. As the historian
speaks of the place he says:
"In this sea" (which is the Solent) "comes a double tide out of the seas
which spring from the infinite ocean of the Arctic surrounding all
Britain."
And he tells us how these double tides rush together and fight together,
sweeping as they do round either side of the island by the Needles and
by Spithead into the land-locked sheet within.
Now that passage in Bede's fourth book is more real to me than anything
in all his chronicle, for in Southampton Water to-day the living thing
which we still note as we sail is the double tide. You take a falling
tide at the head of the water, near Southampton Town, and if you are not
quick with your business it is checked in two hours and you meet a
strange flood, the second flood, before you have rounded Calshott
Castle.
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