There lies the story.

You instantly think of a wrecked ship; you see men, catastrophes, weeping widows and sweethearts; the spar becomes the central point of the picture, and you forget all about the sea.

Moreover, the ancients, who surely had an eye for all that is grand and beautiful, they did not know either what to do with the sea.
They were a magnificent race, healthy-minded realists--and kept strictly to the evidences of their senses without adding anything transcendental.

The sea only appealed to their ear.

Homer's adjectives for the sea are only expressive of sound--the resounding, the jubilant, the loud-rushing; hardly more than once does he allude to the gloomy or the wine-colored sea." "You have your classics at your fingers' ends, like any philologist." "That need not surprise you.