(74)
Calcutta,
16th April: 1893.
It is only when we commune alone with nature, face to face, that it becomes at all possible to realise our pristine and profound relations with the sea.
As I gaze on the sea and listen to its eternal melody, I seem to understand how my restless heart of to-day used to be dumbly agitated then with its heaving, desolate waters, when in the beginning there was no land, but only the sea all by itself.
The sea of my mind to-day is heaving much in the same way, as though something were being created in the chaos beneath its surface;—vague hopes and uncertain fears, trustings and doubtings; heavens and hells; elusive, inscrutable feelings and imaginings; the ineffable mystery of beauty, the unfathomable depths of love; the thousand and one ever-new kaleidoscopic combinations of the human mind, of which it is impossible even to be conscious until one is alone with oneself under the open sky, or beside the open sea.
