"The sea was distinctly visible for a mile all round the Nautilus. What a spectacle! What pen can describe it? Who could paint the effects of the light through those transparent sheets of water, and the softness of the successive gradations from the lower to the superior strata of the ocean?"
I'd started re-reading it, leaving it here. The first time I read, I missed not a word. I was eleven and understood only some of the complicated terms in it.