sweet mystery

 

 .

There is, one knows not what sweet mystery 
about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seems to speak 
of some hidden 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; 

the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.

—Herman Melville 
Moby-Dick, 1851

.