Then, after a few centuries, the English woke up again to the sea most furiously, in the turn of the Middle Ages. The sea moves them less and less later on. They half forget it. And again, 350 years ago, it catches them again, and they became great captains and have so remained, the English.
This makes me think of another thing, which is the difference in the way the sea has affected the literature of one seafaring nation and another. And there again I can find no explanation. The poems of Homer (which were not, if I may humbly suggest it, written by a committee, but by one man, for it is a rare and individual thing to write a good poem, and these poems are good) are not so much influenced by the sea as are themselves the sea. The Iliad and the Odyssey are epics of the sea--yes, not only the Odyssey, but the Iliad too. The sea comes in all the time and mixes up with the story in a way it does with no other story, not even with the story of Tristan. The moment a word or two on the sea comes into the Iliad the phrase wakes up and moves, and, what is more, _there_ you get exact physical description, physical description by a man who has sailed. In most of Homer what is vivid is either a knowledge of what was in men's minds, or a thing told to the writer by others, or the gentle contemplation of some art of which he was himself ignorant and which seemed to him marvellous. But in the matter of the sea it is quite another thing. The names of the Nereids, of the "Nereids as many as there are in the depths of the salt," from the thirty-eighth to the forty-eighth line, those ten lines of marvel, are the names of waves, and of waves seen by the eye of a man. They are not at second hand. They are all the aspects and all the revelations of the wave.
I am told also that the poet Hesiod gave a complete catalogue of these same ladies, but did it rather less well. Homer has a heavenly roll-call of them, and the best of their names, in my unfortunate judgment, is "Limnoreia," "the wave that runs along the shore." For I also have seen Her, gently running in easy weather along the half-ebb glistening sand, a distant shore. But all their names are at once beautiful and true.
Then also, how exact are his words for the noise of a boat speaking through the depths of the water! And what an epithet for the sea is "cloud-shadowed," or, for the matter of that, "wine dark," though it is true the same word is granted to oxen.