“Of all objects that I have ever seen, there is none which affects my imagination so much as the sea and the ocean. I cannot see the heaving of this prodigious bulk of waters, even in a calm, without a very pleasing astonishment; but when it is worked up in a tempest, so that the horizon on every side is nothing but foaming billows and floating mountains, it is impossible to describe the agreeable horror that rises from such a prospect. A troubled ocean, to a man who sails upon it, is, I think, the biggest object that can be seen in motion, and consequently gives his imagination one of the highest kinds of pleasure that can arise from greatness.”
Joseph Addison – The Spectator, 1712
(Addison’s travels to Europe and Ireland gave him first-hand knowledge of the sea. A brilliant essayist he was a leading contributor to The Tatler and The Spectator, periodicals that helped establish the English tradition of social and literary criticism.)
