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is a New England term, and you may hear the good Bostonian
any hot summer day prophesy a sea-turn with falling
night. It comes suddenly, too, sometimes nipping the
unwary and mauling the frail. You must be no weakling
if you are to live by the sea, even in July. She is
a rough nurse, and cherishes her strong sons by the
easy process of eliminating their tenderer brothers.
The seaboard folk are hardy, you notice. Those who took
hurt from the rude play of the elements have been disposed
of. They sleep well under the gray stones.
I remember one blazing morning
several years ago. It had been an insufferable night,
when you were content to lounge about the [Page
41] empty streets of Beacon Hill and rest on
the deserted stone door-steps. Indoors there was nothing
to breathe. Up over this city of dreadful night rose
the brassy, unmitigated sun, till the asphalt sizzled
in the steaming air. The whole town went to its office
in shirt-sleeves — almost. Will you believe it?
— before noon the newsboys were crying extras
of the great change of temperature. The east wind on
us like a frost. The wise ones sought a thicker coat,
but the foolish took off their hats, let the cold wind
blow under their arms, and many of them never needed
a coat again.
But
for the average being (or perhaps one should say for
the normal — that is somewhat better than average),
the sea is a wonderful mother. And the dweller by the
coast, waiting for the sea-turn to come in on the wings
of the east wind, is a mortal favoured beyond his fellows.
The cool of the mountains is not the same thing; it
is a rare tonic shock, stimulant, thin, and keen, with
nothing of the [Page 42] motherly befriending
touch of the sea’s breath. For the coolness of
the hills seems to be what it really is — the
exhaustion and vanishing of all warmth, as if one were
left to perish for lack of the generous sun. In that
high, pure atmosphere the arrowy rays come down unobstructed
and burn to the bone at times, but the moment our lord
of day is behind the hill not a trace of his presence
remains, not a vestige of all his vehement fervour.
There may not be a ghost of air stirring, yet the chill
is about you on the instant, and woollens are comfortable.
It is like being left in a vault, for all you are on
the roof of the world.
The
cool of the sea is a positive thing. In the first place
it has a very real savour, and perhaps that helps to
delude us; though I fancy the feel of it is different,
too. Not so dry as hill cold, its touch must be softer,
more velvety, with its cushion of humidity. It is more
alive, too. How should it not be so, blown off the face
of the breathing sea? [Page 43] And
this wonderful life, this aliveness of the sea, it must
be which impresses the inlander and the mountaineer.
It may be that, as a people, whose fathers have been
seafarers and maritime for hundreds of generations,
we are under the sway and superstition of the ocean.
One cannot be sure. And as you or I come within sound
of the shore after a long absence, perhaps it speaks
to us as it would not speak to men of an immemorially
hill-bound race. Certainly it has more to say to one
than the lofty homes of the forest and the eternal peaks
that hold up the canopy of blue. And you may repeat
with Emerson:
“I
heard, or seemed to hear, the chiding sea
Say, Pilgrim, why so late and slow to come?
Am I not always here, thy summer home?
Is not my voice thy music, morn and eve?
My breath thy healthful climate in the hearts,
My
touch thy antidote, my bay thy bath?”
But
of all sea poetry, perhaps no verses have more of the
sea’s true rhythm, sombre and noble, than Rossetti’s
“Sea-Limits:” [Page 44]
“Consider
the sea’s listless chime;
Time’s
self it is made audible —
The
murmur of the earth’s own shell.
Secret
continuance sublime
Is
the sea’s end. Our sight may pass
No
furlong further. Since time was,
This
sound hath told the lapse of time.”
There
is in these line (is there not?) the slow cadence of
the surf, the dirging undertone of mortal sorrow. The
same note and feeling are in Arnold’s “Dover
Beach:”
“Only
from the long line of spray,
Where
the ebb meets the moon-blanched sand,
Listen!
You hear the grating roar
Of
pebbles, which the waves suck back and fling
At
their return, high up the strand,
Begin
and cease and then again begin,
With
tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The
eternal note of sadness in.”
There
is an impressiveness in store for the citizen who comes
out of his city to confront either the world of ocean
or the world of hills; but they will affect him in different
[Page 45] ways. The mountains may be
your friend, but the sea is your lover. Those serene
heights that have stood unmoved so many countless years,
how they pique our thought — the eternal repose
unanswering the restless mind. You may live with them
in respectful companionship (if you are rightly modest
and patient and lowly-minded), and after many days you
may come to find that they have impressed upon your
unworthy self something of their own austere character,
their Spartan fortitude. But the sad-voiced sea is not
so solitary nor so taciturn. All her turbulent, distraught
life is yours in a moment. She is for confidences immediately,
and never wearies all day of recounting the ancient
story of her perished pride and innumerable tears. In
her voice is the wistfulness of ages, and, as you listen,
the echo beats and reverberates through your own human
heart. You need not be a sentimentalist to know this.
And, as I say, one never can know the true truth about
nature, one can only know the apparent truth; [Page
46] and that is so largely a matter of heredity,
a matter of our unnumbered experience since the first
sunrise. Perhaps if a creature were to come into this
earth endowed with sense and perceptions like our own,
yet without our heritage of sentiments and our ageless
endowment of emotions, the sea might seem to him to
sing the gladdest songs. But to us who have lived by
her side so many thousand gray years, with all their
sea tragedies, sea sorrows, sea changes, it cannot be
so. We unconsciously find in the face of the earth a
likeness of ourselves. And we shall never in this world
be other than prejudiced observers. But, then, our business
is not to find gladness everywhere in nature, but to
bring gladness everywhere with us. [Page
47]
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