A Book of Myths, by Jean Lang - Umnet

unutterable woe upon any of the sons of men. In lonely far-off places
by the sea there still are tales of exquisite melodies heard in the
gloaming, or at night when the moon makes a silver pathway across the
water; still are there stories of women whose home is in the depths of
the ocean, and who come to charm away men's souls by their beauty
and by their pitiful longing for human love.
Those who have looked on the yellow-green waters of the Seine, or
who have seen the more turbid, more powerful Thames sweeping her
serious, majestic way down towards the open ocean, at Westminster, or
at London Bridge, can perhaps realise something of that inwardness of
things that made the people of the past, and that makes the mentally
uncontrolled people of the present, feel a fateful power calling upon
them to listen to the insistence of the exacting waters, and to surrender
their lives and their souls forever to a thing that called and which would
brook no denial. In the Morgue, or in a mortuary by the river-side, their
poor bodies have lain when the rivers have worked their will with them,
and "Suicide," "Death by drowning," or "By Misadventure" have been
the verdicts given. We live in a too practical, too utterly
common-sensical age to conceive a poor woman with nothing on earth
left to live for, being lured down to the Shades by a creature of the
water, or a man who longs for death seeing a beautiful daughter of a
river-god beckoning to him to come where he will find peace
everlasting.
Yet ever we war with the sea. All of us know her seductive charm, but
all of us fear her. The boundary line between our fear of the fierce,
remorseless, ever-seeking, cruel waves that lap up life swiftly as a
thirsty beast laps water, and the old belief in cruel sea-creatures that
sought constantly for the human things that were to be their prey, is a
very narrow one. And once we have seen the sea in a rage, flinging
herself in terrible anger against the poor, frail toy that the hands of men
have made and that was intended to rule and to resist her, foaming and
frothing over the decks of the thing that carries human lives, we can
understand much of the old pagan belief. If one has watched a river in
spate, red as with blood, rushing triumphantly over all resistance,
smashing down the trees that baulk it, sweeping away each poor,