The pulse of the blue god is the tides.  The earth turns towards the moon and the stars with a sympathetic rotation like that of the flowers that turn towards the sun.  Its most movable part—­the fluid mass of the atmosphere—­dilates twice daily, swelling its cavities; and this atmospheric suction, the work of universal attraction, is reflected in the tidal waters.  Closed seas, like the Mediterranean, scarcely feel its effects, the tides stopping at their door.  But on the oceanic coast the marine pulsation vexes the army of the waves, hurrying them daily to their assault of the steep cliffs, making them roar with fury among the islands, promontories and straits, and impelling them to swallow up extensive lands which they return hours afterward.

This salty sea, like our body, that has a heart, a pulse and a circulation of two different bloods incessantly renewed and transformed, becomes as furious as an organic creature when the horizontal currents of its interior come to unite themselves with the vertical currents descending from the atmosphere.  The violent passage of the winds, the crises of evaporation, and the obscure electrical forces produce the tempests.

These are no more than cutaneous shudderings.  The storms, so deadly for mankind, merely contract the marine epidermis while the profound mass of its waters remains in murky calm, fulfilling its great function of nourishing and renewing life.  Father Ocean completely ignores the existence of the human insects that dare to slip across his surface in microscopic cockle-shells.  He does not inform himself as to the incidents that may be taking place upon the roof of his dwelling.  His life continues on,—­balanced, calm, infinite, engendering millions upon millions of beings in the thousandth part of a second.

The majesty of the Atlantic on tropical nights made Ulysses forget the wrathful storms of its black days.  In the moonlight it was an immense plane of vivid silver streaked with serpentine shadows.  Its soft doughlike undulations, replete with microscopic life, illuminated the nights.  The infusoria, a-tremble with love, glowed with a bluish phosphorescence.  The sea was like luminous milk.  The foam breaking against the prow sparkled like broken fragments of electric globes.

When it was absolutely tranquil and the ship remained immovable with drooping sail, the stars passing slowly from one side of the mast to the other, the delicate medusae, that the slightest wave was able to crush, would come to the surface floating on the waters, around the island of wood.  There were thousands of these umbrellas filing slowly by, green, blue, rose, with a vague coloring similar to oil-lights,—­a Japanese procession seen from above, that on one side was lost in the mystery of the black waters and incessantly reappeared on the other side.

The young pilot loved navigation in a sailing ship,—­the struggle with the wind, the solitude of its calms.  He was far nearer the ocean here than on the bridge of a transatlantic liner.  The bark did not beat the sea into such rabid foam.  It slipped discreetly along as in the maritime silence of the first millennium of the new-born earth.  The oceanic inhabitants approached it confidently upon seeing it rolling like a mute and inoffensive whale.