The hidden soul below

There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about the sea, whose gently awful stirring seems to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters’ Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly. For here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming still, tossed like slumberers in their beds; the ever rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.

-- Melville, Moby Dick, (525)