Sea-Studies [pp. 297-303]

THE
OVERLAND MONTHLY
DEVOTED TO
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE COUNTRY.
VOL. 8.-,APRIL, I872. —NO. 4.
SEA - STUDIES.
HO can paint a square yard of
sea? Its surface, this morning, and before it has become perfectly
smooth under the lifeless air, presents
an appearance formidable to analysis
and description, and much more so to
delineation. Labyrinthine, round - topped wavelets intersect, forming small
oval lakelets, of a lighter blue, with thin,
black-penciled outlines. When the sails
or the ship's hull stoops over them in the
rocking movement of a calm, while the
little, winding, watery hills retain essentially the same color, the curved hollows
take on, for the moment, a yellow or
black hue, which, as the ship retires,
breaks up into squares and bars of black
or gold, and gives place again to blue.
The effect is like that from the rapid dispersion of drab bonnets and brown coats,
when a Quaker conventicle was invaded
by constables in the time of Charles the
Second.
In a perfect calm, the task proposed
is comparatively easy. The color mazarine selected, a shade of purple being
added, if the day is cloudy, the light
curve of gentle swell sketched, the polished canvas darkened with the body of
the ship, or whitened by its sails; and the
work is substantially done. A shoal of
tiny fish, gleaming with tropical huesone of them leaping from the water and
dashing out, radiating circles of mimic
surge-might agreeably diversify this
picture of still-life. But this would be
the sport of the artist's fancy, after the
conscientious copying of Nature had
been performed.
Let the air stir ever so lightly from its
morbid stillness, and then look over the
ship's side. See those slender ridges,
ranged in short, parallel curves, from
three to six deep. In the space of a
square yard, fifty other associations of
waves intersect, similar in size and grouping, but following arcs of various diameters. Occasionally some lunar or aerial force will break up several sets of
curves and drive them before it into fretted lines, which retain their parallelism,
and, though straight in general direction,
plainly reveal their composite character.
If the water,before the movement of the
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by JOHN H. CARMANY, in the Office of the
Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
VOL. VIII.- 20o.