Progress and science may perhaps enable untold millions to live and die without a care, without a pang, without an anxiety. They will have a pleasant passage and plenty of brilliant conversation. They will wonder that men ever believed at all in clanging fights and blazing towns and sinking ships and praying hands; and, when they come to the end of their voyage, they will go their way, and the place thereof will know them no more. But it seems unlikely that they will have such knowledge of the great ocean on which they sail, with its storms and wrecks, its currents and icebergs, its huge waves and mighty winds, as those who battled with it for years together in the little craft, which, if they had few other merits, brought them into the presence of time and eternity, their Maker and themselves, and forced them to have some definite view of their relations to them and to each other.
"Essays by a Barrister", Fitz-James Stephens
London, 1862