“These waves, this ebb and flow, this terrible to‑and‑fro, this noise of every breath of air, these darknesses and these transparencies, these growths that belong to the abyss, this demagogy of clouds in the thick of a hurricane, these eagles in the foam, these marvellous dawnings of stars, flung back in some mysterious tumult by millions of luminous crests, the confused heads of the innumerable, these great wandering bolts of lightning that seem to lie in wait, these immense sobs, these half‑seen monsters, these nights of darkness slashed by roars, these furies, these frenzies, these storms, these rocks, these shipwrecks, these fleets colliding, these human thunders mingled with divine thunders, this blood in the deep; and then these graces, these gentlenesses, these festivities, these cheerful white sails, these fishing boats, these songs cutting through the din, these splendid harbours, these smokes rising from the land, these cities on the horizon, this deep blue of water and sky, this useful acridity, this bitterness that purifies the universe, this harsh salt without which everything would rot; these rages and these calms, this all‑in‑one, this unexpected lodged in the immutable, this vast marvel of monotony endlessly varied, this levelling after this upheaval, these hells and these paradises of immensity eternally stirred, this infinite, this unfathomable; all this can exist within a single mind, and then that mind is called genius, and you have Aeschylus, you have Isaiah, you have Juvenal, you have Dante, you have Michelangelo, you have Shakespeare, and it is the same thing to contemplate these souls as to gaze upon the Ocean.”
— William Shakespeare, by Victor Hugo, translated by Frédérique Stref