THE VOICE OF THE OCEAN.

North Otago Times, Volume VI, Issue 111, 5 April 1866, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE VOICE OF THE OCEAN.

"Was it the voice of the distant surf that was in mine ears, or the low moan of the breeze, as it crept through the neighbouring wood? O the hoarse voice of the ocean, never silent since time first began — where has it not been uttered ? There is stillness amid the calm of the arid and rainless desert, where no spring rises, and no streamlet flows ; and the long caravan plies its weary march amid the blinding glare of the sand, and the red, unshaded rays of the fierce sun. But once and again, and again, has the roar of the ocean been there. It is his sands that the wind heaps up ; and it is the skeleton remains of his vassals— shells and fish, and the stony coral — that the rocks underneath enclose. There is silence on the tall mountain peak, with its glittering mansion of snow, where the panting lungs labor to inhale the thin bleak air — where no insect murmurs and no bird flies, and where the eye wanders over multitudinous hilltops that lie far beneath, and vast dark forests thas sweep on to the distant horizon, and along lone hollow valleys where the great rivers begin. And yet once and again, and yet again, has the roar of the ocean been there. The effigies of his most ancient denizens we find sculptured on the crags, where they jut from beneath the ice into the mists-wreath, and his later beaches, stage beyond stage, terrace the descending slopes. Where has the great destroyer not been — the devourer of continents — the blue foaming dragon, whose vocation is to eat up the land? His icefloes have alike furrowed the flat steppes of Siberia, and the rocky flanks of Sehehallian ; and his nummultics and fish lie imbedded in great stones of the pyramids, hewn in the times of the Pharaohs, and in rocky folds of Lebanon, still untouched by the tool. So long as ocean exists, there must be disintegration, dilapidation, change ; and should the time ever arrive when the elevatory agencies, motionless and chill, shall sleep within their profound depths, to awaken no more — and should the sea still continue to impel its currents and to impel its waves — every continent and island would at length disappear, and again, as of old, when the fountains of the great deep were broken up, 4 A shoreless ocean tumble louml the globe.' Was it with reference to this principle, so recently recognised, that we nre expressly told in the Apocalypse respecting the renovated earth, in which the state of things shall be fixed and eternal, that there shall be no more sea ?' or, are we to regard the revelation as the mere hieroglyphic — the pictured shape — of some analogous moral truth ? ' Reasoning from what we know,' — and from what else remains to us ? — an earth without a sea would be an earth without rain, without vegetation, without life — a dead and doleful planet of waste places, such as the telescope reveals to ua in the moon. — Hugh. Miller.