anything but cold blue and blank black

The following passage was read to me several weeks ago. The words have been with me and my thoughts because it has been better than anything in a while. It makes me feel something I can't explain. It comes from an old book entitled "The Growing World" which appears to have been published in 1882. The book is filled with a "useful and entertaining collection of miscellany" and this passage was one out of hundreds. It's best when read out loud; either to yourself or someone you care about.

Depths of the Ocean

It has been ascertained by soundings that the roaring waves and the mightiest billow of the ocean repose, not upon hard and troubled beds, but upon cushions of still water; that everywhere at the bottom of the deep sea, the solid ribs of the earth are protected, as with a garment, from the abrading action of its currents; that the cradle of its restless waves is lined by a stratum of water at rest, or so nearly at rest that it can neither wear nor move the lightest bit of drift-stuff that once lodges there.

The uniform appearance of the microscopic shells, and the almost total absence among them of any sediment from the sea or foreign matter, suggests most forcibly the idea of perfect repose at the bottom of the deep. Some of the specimens are as pure and as free from sand as the fresh fallen snow-flake is from the dust of the earth.

Soundings seem to prove that showers of these beautiful shells are constantly falling down upon the ocean floor, and the wrecks which strew the sea-bottom are, in the lapse of ages, encrusted over with these tiny, fleecy things, until they present the rounded outlines of bodies buried beneath the snow-fall.

The ocean, especially near and within the tropics, swarms with life. The remains of its myriads of moving things are conveyed by currents, and scattered and lodged in the course of time, all over the bottom. This process, continued for ages, has covered the depths of the ocean as with a mantle, consisting of organisms as delicate as hoar-frost, and as light in the water as down in the air. CAPTAIN CARNES